Wrong Dogs, Mr Cameron!

Well, HMRC is to set its rottweilers to chase SME rabbits later this year - but the wolves at the Insolvency Service have had their teeth drawn.

The Insolvency Services' budget was cut last year to just over £4,000 per case - a ridiculous figure given the work involved in managing even an average run-of-the-mill insolvency - and 400 jobs at the already under-resourced service are due to disappear very soon.

So tell me, who is now going to pursue the jackals - the Directors who deserve to be disqualified, and who (in the absence of a well-funded and committed watchdog) will likely be free to evade taxes, significantly fail to keep accurate or proper records, run business after business into the ground and retard economic recovery simply because they are clever enough to manipulate the system?

We certainly need to make cuts in public expenditure - but I can't help thinking that the Government has sent the wrong dogs to the dentist on this particular occasion.

The Insolvency Service has never been a popular body - an icy-eyed, slavering Governmental wolf is a hard sell - but the fact is that we need a strong, committed, well-funded involvency service that is capable of regulating the business community, because, sadly, there will always be people who deserve, one chilly, chilling mornng, to explain themseves to an icy-eyed, slavering, Governmental wolf.

The Ultimate in Brass Neck

Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs is planning to cast its eagle eye on small businesses tax payments and record keeping later this year. It will be looking for what it calls 'significant record keeping failures' and (of course!) unpaid taxes. Fines for either default could exceed £3,000.00.

The Forum of Private Business has, as usual, come up with some very good advice, and you can read it by going to 'News' on their site.

In the meantime, I think I have to say that coming from a Government Department whose 'significant record keeping failures' resulted in the very recent past in large numbers of people having to find - suddenly, unexpectedly, and immediately - comparitively large sums of money in order to rectify the errors of HMRC employees is surely the ultimate in brass neck.

The fact is that the tax system is now such an impenetrable maze that it baffles the people who are supposed to administer it. The Forum of Private Business and its members are calling for various reforms, including a major root-and-branch simplification of the system to make it easier for small businesses to negotiate their tax responsibilities.

I would call for a major root-and-branch simplification of the system to make it easier for everyone to negotiate their tax responsibilities. I would also call for 'accountability for error' to apply to HMRC and its employees rather than just to the rest of us. And whilst we're about changing the behemoth that HMRC has become into the public servant it is supposed to be, compulsory training for all HMRC employees in communication, public relations, and customer service would not come amiss...

Come Tweet With Us

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned that hardly a day went by without somebody sending me an e-mail or an article about social media and how to use it. Today it was my wifes' hosting companys' turn.

The subject line of the e-mail read 'Embrace Social Media in 2011', and the text went on to advise us that Twitter has 200 million users, and that smart businesses know that Tweeting isn't a passing fad, which we already knew. The article attached to the e-mail, though, was very interesting indeed, and you can find it at Hostway's Web Resources Page.

This particular article happens to be about Tweeting, but there's a search box at the top of the page called 'What Do You Want to Learn About'. I typed in 'blogging' and got an initial list of ten interesting and informative places to go. Definitely a site to put into 'favourites'!

Can't Be Bothered With Social Media? Don't See the Point? Might Be Time for a Re-Think.

Apparently, a lot of SMEs can't be bothered with social media and don't see the point of getting involved with it or using it - and quite a few others have stuck a toe in the water and found it too cold for comfort. In fact, a recent poll of 5,800 of its members by the Federation of Private Business pulled up some very negative responses to questions about the use (and usefulness!) of social media to SMEs.

Which leads me to ask: how many SMEs have taken the trouble to learn how to use social media properly and to their own best advantage?

I appreciate, of course, that learning (and then using!) something completely new takes time - and as an SME myself I understand that every day is crammed with essential tasks, and that squeezing something else into an already over-crowded twenty-four hours isn't a pleasant prospect. But I also see that social media has become such a vital marketing tool for SMEs that there are an ever-growing number of websites and seminars dedicated to teaching them how to use it.

One of those websites is Social Media for Small Business . It isn't the only place to go to learn about social media and its advantages, but it's a free place to start to have re-think about what you might achieve by taking advantage of technology.

Your WWW - Forget the Bells and Whistles

Some people's websites are works of art, and I love looking at them and exploring them. The problem is that the message often gets lost in the flash and the pictures and the sheer artistry of it all, and finding the information that I actually want sometimes becomes so difficult that I eventually give up and go and look for it somewhere else.

In fact, quite a lot of websites that I look at these days remind me of a television advertisement that was shown over and over many years ago. It featured a tiger racing across sand dunes, and it was an extraordinarily beautiful piece of photography of an extraordinarily beautiful animal. It was intended, of course, to induce people to buy one brand of petrol rather than another. The difficulty lay in remembering what the product was, never the mind the brand, once the image of the cat had gone from the screen but was stuck in your head...

The whole point of having a website is to inform other people of whom you are, what your product or service is, how they can get hold of you or it, and how quickly.

Keep your website simple stupid. Bells and whistles are wonderful, but they do tend to be distracting.

WWW - Not Really Such A Big Place

When I was talking to various people about websites (and asking them why they hadn't got one!) quite a lot of them said they didn't feel that getting a website was worth the effort because the internet was too big a place for a small firm to make any impact.

That isn't really true. In fact the internet is a much harder nut to crack for a large firm looking to do business internationally than it is for a small firm looking to do business locally.

Small businesses can take advantage of Business Listings, Business Directories and town sites that offer free advertising to local shops and service providers - and obviously it's worthwhile tracking down free advertising opportunities.

Small firms can also make their internet world a lot smaller by choosing a domain name that specifically states what they do and where they are - like 'plumberatcirencester.co.uk', for example, which was in fact available when I checked it this morning, just in case you happen to be a plumber in Circencester who's looking to get a website started!

Obviously there are things that you need to do when you're building your site to ensure that search engines find it, but if you are building your site with your hosts' on-line tools, you'll find lots of advice available as to how to do that easily and advantageously in your hosts' 'help' section.

WWW your Company the Easy Way

The easiest (and cheapest!) way to begin to build an on-line profile for your Company (or yourself) is to look for a reliable one-stop-shop - somewhere you can buy a domain name and a hosting package, and use the host's own templates and on-line tools to design your site and publish it.

There are quite a few hosting companies around that will allow you to do all of those things, but Fasthosts is a good place to begin to find out what you can get and for how much - particularly as they are offering 50% off hosting packages for six months and a free UK domain at the moment. You'll also be able to see examples of the sort of templates, tools and add-ons that the Fasthosts 'Sitebuilder' service can provide.

By shopping around, you might find even cheaper options - but make sure that the host you propose using offers adequate support. Fasthosts does - 24/7 on-line and telephone support comes as standard with every hosting package.

I don't incidentally, use Fasthosts myself at the moment - but I might well change my mind!

Make a Resolution to Get Noticed!

Just lately I can't seem to open my in-box without finding something new about social media and its usefulness and importance to SMEs - and if social media isn't on the menu that day, articles about web awareness and internet technology are nearly always there instead.

I'm not surprised. The internet offers huge opportunities for any business to sell its products or services, promote itself, raise its profile and stand out from the crowd, and any number of people have a vested interest in making sure that as many unconverted or unconvinced people as possible know that. What does surprise me, though, is that many SMEs don't seem to be taking advantage of powerful promotional tools that can very cheap or cost nothing but time.

I began to think about that initially last October, when the Forum of Private business published the results of a referendum themed around electronic technology and smaller firms. 5,800 business owners took part, and the results astonished me.

Only 58% of the people polled used social media sites like LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter - and only 7% of those people thought them very useful. 19% of of people polled did not have a website and a fifth only communicated with customers and suppliers through 'traditional' means.

There are literally hundreds of thousands of small businesses operating in the UK, and I couldn't help wondering whether those percentages would hold true overall, or whether - as I suspect would be the case - a country-wide referendum would paint an even less technologically optimistic picture.

I also began to wonder why so many people were having such poor experiences with social media - or were avoiding experiencing it at all - and why so many people were not bothering to get a website, which has to be the cheapest and most efficient form of paid advertising ever invented.

Having asked around, I found that people were worried about taking on a project that they perceived as being difficult and potentially expensive - which is a pity, because putting together a successful web presence for any small business is a relatively easy and inexpensive project if you are prepared to spend some time doing things yourself. Over the next couple of weeks, I'll be explaining how I did it, and how much it cost me to do it. In the meantime:

Happy New Year!