Despite high-level commentators wringing their hands about a W or even VW economic recovery, UK small businesses are a fairly chipper lot. According to research from BT Business, launched to coincide with the commencement of Small Business Week, 35 per cent of small businesses predict an upswing by within the next three months. Three quarters say it will have happened sometime in 2010.
The report, culled from 7,200 respondents, reveals a striking amount of optimism, with 45 per cent of them saying they have become better businesses as a result of the recession.
Small Business Week 2009 is supported by ACCA, BCC, BT Business, Business Link, Everywoman, Growing Business, and NatWest. The event was kicked off with a business leadership panel at the BT Tower.
The panellists, Lord Digby Jones and Dragon Peter Jones, along with BT Business strategy director Mick Hegarty, BCC Director General David Frost, Conservative Party shadow business spokesman Mark Prisk and Sara Harvey, ACCA small business committee vice chair, agreed things get even tougher for SMEs to survive coming out of a recession than they do going into one. Here’s some advice that came from that event:
- Give local MPs a hard time about what they are promising for small businesses post election. They don’t know business. Remember you generate the wealth that supports taxation. They will be desperate to get you on-side in the next six months.
- Put pressure on the banks to lend. SMEs can’t rely on friends and family, as a third of the respondents to the survey were forced to do. Often, banks’ stated willingness to lend comes into conflict with branch managers not wanting to risk their own positions. Go higher, to regional managers who aren’t so chary of losing their own jobs.
- Don’t be a banker to your customers. Get hard on them. Why should you borrow from your bank, just so they don’t have to service their own debt? Manage your finances scrupulously.
- Move up the innovation ladder and export. It’s no good competing on a commodity business model with the rice-bowl belt. Move up the value chain and complement your competitors overseas.
- Your staff were with you on the way down — don’t forget them on the way up. You won’t survive the upturn unless you have retained a reservoir of skilled people. Be open with your employees about how the business is doing and be creative with benefits — even a small ad hoc bonus when you can afford it, makes a difference.
(Pic tonylanciabeta cc2.0)
