Shareholder agreements give startups the focus they need to thrive May 17, 2016 Building a business is a labour of love. Not just for the founders, but also for the employees and investors. I regularly sit down with founders to go through shareholder agreements. The process uncovers the real objectives for starting the business, it gets founders thinking about issues before they happen, and it gets to the [...]
Pact Coffee’s Stephen Rapoport: Why our mission is central to our growth May 17, 2016 Coffee culture is having a renaissance. We are aping London of the eighteenth century, when our ancestors couldn’t get enough of the brown stuff. But while their caffeine fuelled debates about politics, fashion and philosophy, we still mostly use it to get us out of bed each day. One entrepreneur hopes to add an additional [...]
Identity and security: The price we must pay to keep our information safe – and the companies helping us do it May 17, 2016 In ancient Roman mythology, Janus, the god of boundaries, is usually depicted as having two faces. Skip a few thousand years to today’s modern world, and many of us still wear more than one mask: there’s the one we present at work, one we wear in front of family, and others we wear in front [...]
The Prince’s Trust’s 40th anniversary: How business is helping deprived young people flourish May 17, 2016 Today Buckingham Palace hosts a garden party to mark the fortieth anniversary of The Prince’s Trust, the Prince of Wales’ oldest and largest charity. It will be attended by some of the thousands of young people whose lives have been turned around by this amazing organisation, along with volunteers, supporters and staff. As chairman of [...]
Lessons from New York: Bigger is no longer better in the new world of ambitious scaleups May 17, 2016 Every business is a hypothesis based on a bet. And if you want to bet big, grow small. That’s the lesson I learned on a recent visit to New York to meet the scaleup businesses aiming to become tomorrow’s titans. Of course, think New York and you think big. The Big Apple, big business and [...]
Forget millennials: This is the crucial reason why you should be focusing on retaining your silver capital – and how to do it May 17, 2016 The workforce in Britain is ageing fast. More than 30 per cent of employees are over 50 years old, and nearly a quarter is over 60. This figure is set to rise to 30.7 per cent by 2020. This demographic shift creates significant challenges. In the next two decades, a large proportion of employees aged over [...]
Lystable’s Peter Johnston talks brutal camps, moving to San Francisco and building the IDs of the future May 16, 2016 Imagine what it would feel like to make your housemate a millionaire within in a year. Your startup’s software enables companies to onboard, resource and pay their contract workers. It’s specific, but sticking to this underserved niche has allowed you to grow very fast. You have 4,500 contractors on your system and you recently had a [...]
I’m in a relationship with a colleague at work: Should I keep it secret? May 16, 2016 Q: A work colleague and I have recently started dating. Neither of us is the other’s direct manager, but we do work in the same department. We’ve kept our relationship hidden till now, but as it becomes more serious, do we need to maintain secrecy? What other issues should we be aware of? Our work colleagues are likely to be the people with whom we spend [...]
Your next big payrise isn’t due until 2020 May 16, 2016 Workers banking on a bumper pay boost might find themselves disappointed, as a report out today has found that payrises have ground to an almost halt and could stay that way for the rest of the decade. A survey of more than 1,000 employers by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) discovered that pay [...]
These are the UK’s most attractive employers May 13, 2016 Rolls Royce has topped a list of big companies that Britons want to work for. The automotive aerospace giant fared well on criteria such as salary and employee benefits, long-term job security and a pleasant working atmosphere. British Airways and Marks & Spencer took second and third place respectively, followed by car companies BMW and Jaguar Land [...]