What Do You Do? This is the most common question I ask after reading a business plan. Strange isn’t it? A business plan is all about the business, what it does, what it will do, how it will do it etc. Which makes it all the more surprising that so often a business plan can
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Getting a Bank Loan or Dating? Businesses get turned down for finance, fact. What it doesn’t mean is that your business proposal or the business itself is wrong. Sometimes it just happens. There is a quote from Sahar Hashemi, co-founder of Coffee Republic; For me it’s a numbers game – you should almost notch up
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5 Business Plan Essentials If you have ever searched Google looking for a business plan template or a guide to writing a business plan then you will have come across all number of things purporting to make something simple complicated. As a former employee of HSBC, we used to joke that HSBC stood for ‘How
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Business Finance Is a Foreign Language When you go to Spain it is fair to say we all know a few words, could order our cerveza, count to 10 and the rest. Not many of us are fluent. Take that then try mixing that with a bit of Mandolin, Flemish, Arabic, and Esperanto. Just how
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Strategic thinking is something that can be a concept that bypasses the small business operator. Too often the biggest strategy a small business has is completing the job in hand and winning the next sale. Small businesses are in the unique position that they are flexible and adaptable enough to change at short notice, to
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For a while now we have felt that something has been missing from our proposition. The solutions we provide for business finance, commercial lending and business growth are great, but we needed to be noticed more. After some serious thought we decided to slightly re-brand and launch our first piece of promotional literature. Lime Consultancy
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It never ceases to amaze that many businesses spend more time comparing and preparing for small changes in their business, yet don’t put the same time and research into raising company finance. This may be down to a basic understanding, and that most high street lenders (banks) are guarded about how they asses finance, and
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The Unique Selling Point (USP) is just about the only thing that will differentiate you from your competitors. The difficult thing is in finding your USP, it is not always where you think it is, often it is a thing of marginal fiction, made up, created, dreamed up to make your business that little bit
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