It never ceases to amazing me how many “business opportunities” find their way to you when you come in to a bit of money. All sorts of people come out of the woodwork with the next Facebook, MySpace or even UK Business Forums! Only this week I was contacted by someone looking to setup another forum with the plans to sell it for hundreds of thousands, and wanted me to give them all the information they needed to achieve that.

Now I don’t mind helping people, and I will help whenever I can, but what I do not like are people who are looking to make a fast buck by leaching onto someone elses success. Those who know me will know that I devote a lot of time to sharing any knowledge with people who I can clearly see putting in the extra effort themselves, burning the midnight oil, trying their best but simply lack a little experience or expertise in a particular area. I do not like leaches or clinger ons. People who hunt out someone who has something they want, take what they want and dump them.

If you want to make a success of yourself then do it yourself. Seek legitimate help from friends and colleagues, but don’t leach off other peoples success. They will spot you a mile off and you could lose potential mentors or supporters. Also, just because it worked for one person it doesn’t mean it will work for others, how many successful eBay clones do you know of?

I’m very “British”. I know I am and sometimes it’s a serious failing of mine. I’m too polite to complain when the food in the restaurant is not up to scratch, and when our government screws us business owners I bend over and take it right up the backside like thousands of others in the UK.

I’m already annoyed that being a VAT registered business I act as a free debt recovery agent for the HM Revenue & Customs. I collect the VAT duty from my customers on behalf of the government, and then dutifully each quarter I make a nice generous BACS payment to help cover the costs of shipping the publics bank details out to Bin Laden. Then pay tax for the benefit of employing staff, and then my staff pay tax again on their wages, and then I pay corporation tax for making a profit, and then I pay tax on my own earnings, and then I pay tax on my own purchases, and then I pay council tax followed by tax on my car and then tax on my TV, followed by tax on my death and my family will pay tax on any inheritance they get from me. I’m sure I have forgotten about some taxes I pay as an honest citizen, whilst the filthy rich put all their money offshore in hidden bank accounts. The government decides they are far to difficult to chase, so we middle earners take one for England.

Today I wrote a cheque to our lovely HM Revenue & Customs for £245 for the priviledge of being “Supervised” under the up and coming Anti Money Laundering Regulations 2007. You have to love the stupidity of our Government, do they really think that by screwing the good honest business owners in the UK they are going to catch a bunch of terrorists?

So let us get this right, good honest Joe (me) pays more of my hard earned money to robbing bar steward (HMRC) for them to monitor and analyse my business activities just in case Bin Laden decides to use my business to set up a Limited company.  Then just in case he does, and this is where is gets really funny, I have to be skilled enough to identify whether he has managed to defraud the passport office or DVLA to obtain a drivers licence to passport.

That is right campers, we the honest business owners are being penalised and tasked with the duty to compensating for the inadeqacies of our government departments.  Are they going to pay us for this additional workload though, are they hell. Nope instead we have to pay them for the priviledge and cover the additional staffing costs of doing this ourselves, for the good of our country.

Of course, if all us small to medium sized business owners got together to make a stand. Perhaps a small levy on the VAT returns to cover the costs we incure in recovering the VAT payments, what are they going to do? After all, we account for 98.5% of businesses in the UK!

There is a wise old saying that states that helping others is good for the soul. Others know that doing something from the good of your heart gives a warm satisfaction and feeling of well being. This is exactly how I feel after volunteering for Young Enterprise last week, when I spent an entire day teaching 10 year old Year 6 pupils at Kislingbury CEVC Primary School about Import and Exporting, and why all teh countries of the world rely on each other for the trade economy.

The project was called Our World, and it starts by demonstrating where the clothes the  children are wearing have travelled, such as from China and India. Then it moved onto a make believe meal, and the children calculate how far the meal has travelled in total to reach their plates. This part is fascinating to see the amazement on the childrens faces as they begin to realise that a basic Chinese takeaway meal could have travelled some 50,000km before it reaches their door!

The 3rd session is great fun, and is aimed at teaching the children how different countries can work together to produce combined profit, and boost the ecomony of both countries. The room is split into 6x Countries (groups) starting with USA with loads of money and resources but few people through to Bangladesh with little money and resources but lots of people. The children need to identify that if these two countries worked together they can make more produce then work independantly – it almost worked despite myself dropping more hints than I was actually supposed to! Some of the groups did work together and the children all thoroughly enjoyed this part of the day.

After lunch we learnt about the 4P’s of marketing and the children had to design a new product to export to a newly discovered country. They then had to abide by the laws of that country, learn the culture and economy, and design an advertising campaign to suit. The day finished off with each group presenting their new product to the rest of the class.

I thoroughly enjoyed the day and I’m glad to say the children did too. OK you don’t get paid for it, its volunterry, but who cares. I’ve worked with Young Enterprise before with older children aged 15-16 which is just as important, but this was a whole new experience for me. They were older than my children and younger than the age group I have been used to working with so I wasn’t sure how to handle them or what their knowledge level would be. I must admit I was nervous, but didn’t need to be. The children were great, they listened and were keen to learn. The teacher was very supportive, and all in all I recommend every business owner should spend some time on projects like this.

If nothing else, you learn how to teach and that is an important skill to have in life.

I’ve been given the opportunity to get involved in another forum with a business owner who I help mentor occasionally. The guy is John Whitehead and he is a club fitter who runs a company called Strike Right Golf.

It came about during a typical coaching sessions (he was giving me some golf tips and I was giving him some business tips), and was mentioned that he gets a reasonable amount of technical queries from his website but not a lot of business. The conversation moved towards building a community about his website, to get people discussing golf and referring to his website on a daily basis. The end result would be people would be looking at Strike Right Golf to discuss anything golf related.

This then created another problem, would people refer to a club makers website to get independant advice relating to golf? So I took a look at Callaway’s forum and it would appear not. They have a forum and it see’s no more action than .. well something that doesn’t see much action . The same goes for so many other business websites who try to set up communities around their core product, it just doesn’t work.

We’ve decided that the best approach is to use a lesson I learnt from UK Business Forums, and set a brand up in it’s own right and promote it in it’s own right. His business will then benefit from being associated with it, be that by sponsoring or just being on hand to give professional advice. I know on UKBF I became known as the only choice for company formation and John will become known as the only choice for golf club fitting on these soon to be announced golf forums.

So here we go again, workers for the Royal Mail are sealing their own fate, their own redundancy, and pushing Royal Mail out of business by going on yet another strike.

News on the radio says that many small businesses are at risk of going out of business due to lost trade brought about by the strikes, and the Royal Mail have put measures in place to ensure they cannot be held liable for consequencial losses brought about by the strike.

The whole situation is stupid and the half whitted union pushing for these strikes really need their head looking at. Do they not realise that business owners such as myself and many others are finding alternative mail delivery services? We already use The DX, but not surprisingly The DX are really jumping with joy and courting disgruntled Royal Mail customers and winning.

All this union are going to achieve lost revenue for Royal Mail who are then going to have no choice but to make a load of redundancies. So a large number of these workers going on strike today will be out of the job soon, and it will be their own fault. It is not as if they are underpaid for working half a day!

I moved house last week, and anyone who has gone through this painful process will know just how painful it actually is. Maybe not for your first move, but when your family is a bit larger with 2 kids and all the gadgets, toys and generally extra belongings that go with being married with 2 children it becomes a complete military operation that requires pin-point planning!

Combine that with being self employed, working on two new business projects, and having a key member of staff on long term sick, let’s just say I am ever so glad that it is over … or is it! I’d only forgotten to tell anybody that we were actually moving. The electricity company, the water, the gas, Sky, the bank, TV Licence, the DVLA, no-one knew we were moving.

Do you ever see something and wish you’d thought of it? Well I have, iammoving.com is quite simply a brilliantly simple idea and has saved me hours of time.  All I had to do is click on the organisations I want to notify about our move, fill in my account or reference details with that organisation, and then click Notify. Then depending on whether iammoving.com has an electronic agreement with the company or not it either sends my new address information to that company or creates a PDF for me to print out and put in the post. Best of all, so far it seems to be working!

What I really love about this idea though is not that it actually does save you time, or put everything in one place, but that it is such a simple no-brainer idea. The technology behind the website is extremely simple that any good web designer could knock it together in less than a week, it puts all the control on to the user so that the website actually does very little. The updates are sent to the organisations that are on board most likely by email so a simple email script. It is brilliant, so brilliant by its simplicity.

Let’s hope that more organisations sign up to be notified electronically by this website and then we can save time, costs, and the enviroment at the same time.

Now I do consider myself a very considerate employer. I don’t descriminate, I make allowances and where possible adapt within reasons to cater for the needs of my staff (ensuring they don’t take liberties). I have employed young and old, abled and less abled (not allowed to use the word disabled any more), and from many different ethnic origins.

What was the icing on the cake for me was when I received a bulletin from BusinessLink which highlighted the risk of legal action for using certain words in job vacancy advertisments. I feel I cannot contain myself any more, I’ve had it up to and beyond with jumped up overpaid pen pushing morons who do nothing more than try to justify their jobs to our “heads up their own backsides” Government by tarnishing all employers with the same brush and dreaming up different legislation to screw businesses.

If I want to employ a young dynamic person I can justify why I need that type of person for my business. If I want to employ an old experienced person then again I can justify why need that type of person for my business. Both young and old people all have very different and valuable qualities for business, and I as a business owner know, appreciate and respect that.

I don’t need some bureaucrat who has never run a business in their life, and who has no experience in real management, trying to tell me how to choose the right team for my business. I have a fantastic team who work for me, from all walks of life, all with very different strengths and weaknesses, and I need to be able to continue to make decisions to keep it that way.

Whatever next? A 16 year old school leaver managing a team of 300 factory line workers with very strong personalities because the bureacrats say the school leaver should be given a chance, and screw the productivity of the factory. Who will have to tidy the mess when the factory goes under? I bet the Government wont give a flying ….

Next week I’ll be sending out a customer satisfaction survey to all my customers asking them for some honest feedback about what they think of my firms services, in confidence. Were they happy with the pre-sales support, the shopping experience and the after sales care? Were they happy with the products they received, and would they use us again, and perhaps more importantly would they recommend us to someone else who we could help?

Your customers are your biggest assett, and yet it is the same old story that so many companies spend more money trying to win business from the customers they lose than looking after the customers they already have.

I have commissions a company called SurveyLab to run the survey for me, so that we keep it completely independant and are giving away a weekend away for two as a prize for doing the survey. In my opinion spending a few hundred pounds on a weekend holiday for two is money well spent to get plenty of feedback from our customers helping us improve our service, it is just disappointing more companies don’t do this.

Some thoughts for you, you’ve already done the hard work to win your customers over to you. Is it really that hard to look after them once you have them? All it takes is to ask them what they do and do not like, take the time to listen to what they say, and act on their feedback. After all, if you improve your business as a result you will not only lose less customers, but also find it much easier to win more for the future.

This Monday I was taking part in a peer business coaching group and the conversation moved towards business opportunities and ideas. This is a topic which I thoroughly enjoy because it excites the Entrepreneur in me, and during this conversation a comparison was drawn where someone made an assumption about me which rather annoyed me.

I commented that for one particular idea I would invest around £15,000 into the idea to get it going, where someone else recommended actually giving the idea a bit of a go on the side to see if it had any merit before committing to the idea. I then stated that to give the venture its best chance of success you need to do things properly, and that would need investment. The other person came back with “£15k may be a drop in ocean for you but I don’t have that money laying around”.

Big mistake on two accounts. Firstly £15k is not a drop in the ocean, it is a significant investment for any startup and I don’t have a disposable £15k laying around which I wouldn’t miss.

When I started Quick Formations I had no money, I borrowed every penny from loans and credit cards to start the business because I had faith in my business idea. There is no If’s and But’s, the business would succeed and I would make sure it did. I risked the roof over my wife and daughter’s head, I sold everything I owned to pay the bills, and that to me is a true Entrepreneur’s commitment to their business.

Someone who dip’s their toe only demonstrates to me that they don’t really have much faith in their business idea, they are not truly convinced it is or will be a success. If you don’t have enough confidence and faith in your business, why should anyone else?

This month has been a pretty manic month with staff in China, honeymoon and now off long term (operation). I’ve had to step back into the business lately, and to be honest it has been a very good thing. By having developed my business into a company that can run sufficiently without me it enables me to think more strategically and move the business forward. Yet when I need to, it also enables me to step back into the business without lossing too much hair when staff shortages require me to. The most facinating thing I have found though is how far some aspects of the business have moved forward without me, where my staff have found better and sometimes more cost effective ways of doing things. You know you have good staff when things like this happen.

I know I have mentioned it before, but my lesson for today is Empower your staff to make decisions for themselves. You might be surprised that they’ll do it for the benefit for you and your business, not just for themselves. There are also tax advantages available if you pay staff bonuses based on profits earned for the benefits they bring to the business, which is something I am currently looking into.