THE BEST LAID PLANS OF SOME ENTREPRENEURS January 22, 2012 JOHN, Jeremy and Joan had a plan. A good plan. A plan to start a business. They were so sure that the business would succeed that each used £100,000 of their own money to fund the start-up costs and take the inevitable losses until they turned the corner into profit. Their hunch was right, and [...]
A wake-up call for entrepreneurship in the United Kingdom January 15, 2012 A SIMPLE formula exists for writing about entrepreneurs: humble beginnings + fighting against the odds + eventual success = inspiring story. The fairytale profile certainly has its place, but entrepreneurship is a subject that deserves a bit more rigour. After all, it’s entrepreneurs that help create the future for the rest of us. The significance [...]
ENTREPRENEURS NEWS | IN BRIEF December 11, 2011 THE EAST END GETS AN UPGRADE San Francisco based start-up Eventbrite is coming to the east end of London – the online ticket-seller’s first international office. Eventbrite also serves as a platform on which organisers can plan events and promote them using social media. Co-founder of the company Renaud Visage says: “London will be our [...]
ENTREPRENEURS NEWS | IN BRIEF December 4, 2011 NEW PIRATING PENALTIES SCARE INVESTORS Angel investors and venture capitalists are hesitating to invest in digital content intermediaries (DCIs) as the US government contemplates new, tougher rules on pirated digital content. Under the US House Judiciary Committee’s proposed “Stop Online Piracy Act” a website could be subject to fines and penalties if its users uploaded [...]
ENTREPRENEURS NEWS | IN BRIEF November 27, 2011 WEB COULD BE THE KEY FOR SUCCESS Small businesses can use clever website design as a tool to compete against large businesses. Recent research released by Yell shows that when websites are equally matched in sophistication and utility, the consumer is less likely to be able to make the distinction between the size of the [...]
ENTREPRENEURS NEWS | IN BRIEF November 20, 2011 BOOST FOR YOUTH ENTERPRISE EDUCATION Youth Business International and the RBS Group are sponsoring Global Entrepreneurship Week this month. The event will involve over 200,000 participants around the UK and will involve schools, colleges and universities focusing on teaching enterprise skills. The week follows the recent trend of encouraging young entrepreneurs to build on their [...]
ENTREPRENEURS NEWS | IN BRIEF November 6, 2011 SMES TO HIRE MORE STAFF THIS YEAR Over two-thirds of small and medium-sized businesses owners intend to hire new staff in the next six months. This has emerged as the results of research done by the London Entrepreneurial Exchange (LEE). The majority of business owners also agree with the government’s decisions to extend the unfair [...]
INHERITANCE TAX: ENEMY OF ENTREPRENEURS October 23, 2011 AS chancellor George Osborne and his team try to simplify our over-complex tax system, they are looking at taxes whose harmful effects outweigh any good that comes from their revenue. Obviously the 50 per cent top rate of income tax must be a prime candidate, given that the Institute for Fiscal Studies has joined the [...]
Entrepreneurs: born or made with an MBA? October 12, 2011 DO not let Steve Jobs’s gown fool you in this photo. The recently departed, near-legendary founder of Apple and Pixar never finished his undergraduate degree, let alone got an MBA. In this picture, he is giving Stanford University’s 2005 commencement address. In the speech, he told his audience that he “couldn’t see the value” in [...]
ENTREPRENEURS NEWS | IN BRIEF October 9, 2011 ONLINE TRADERS HAVE DOUBLED The number of people earning a second income by trading online has doubled in the last year. A survey by Collect Plus, a parcel delivery and returns service, dubs these online entrepreneurs “e-pportunists”, finding that a third of them earn over £10,000 a year. Over half (59 per cent) of those [...]