The Business Bulletin
Welcome to The Business Bulletin - a weekly collection of useful articles covering all pillars of business created by leading experts in their field. Plus a "spotlight on" interview - gaining insights from small business owners.
In this week's edition:
Struggling to pay tax – what should you do? - Matthew Goude
The January self-assessment payment deadline is not well timed, falling as it does in a month when people may be already struggling to pay their Christmas credit card bills. However unpalatable the 31 January tax deadline is, it is not one that should be ignored.
Taxpayers who are within self-assessment will need to pay any remaining tax due for 2020/21 by midnight on 31 January 2022, and also any Class 4 and Class 2 National Insurance liabilities for 2020/21. Where their tax and Class 4 National Insurance liability for 2020/21 was at least ￡1,000 and less than 80% of their liability was collected at source, such as via PAYE, the first payment on account must also be paid by midnight on 31 January 2022.
If you are struggling to pay what you owe, what can you do?
Contact HMRC
Ignoring the problem will not make it go away; rather, it will make it worse. If you think that you are going to struggle to pay what you owe in full by the 31 January 2022 deadline, you should set up a time to pay agreement or contact HMRC as soon as possible, and ideally before 31 January 2022. However, if you miss this deadline, all is not lost and you may still be able to set up or agree an instalment plan.
Burying your head in the sand is definitely not recommended. It is important to open up a dialogue and review your options with HMRC.
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The challenge of sales - Julie Futcher
Every business owner has faced the challenge, at one point of generating sales whilst being busy “doing” what they sell. If they’ve had an increase in business, it ties them up and doesn’t allow any time for sales generating activities. The result is what I call “the roller coaster of sales”. Working in this way will cause cashflow problems and can lead to stress.
What can be done to stop this?
Good question, and one that I am frequently asked by my clients. The answer lies within the way that their business is structured and here are my 5 top tips to put in place, which when actioned will stop that roller coaster and give you back control.
Create a sales plan – and use it!
A sales plan maps out the goals that you wish to achieve for the year ahead. It is a visual document and can be as simple as an Excel spreadsheet, nothing fancy or complicated. It breaks down the year, on a month-to-month basis, details the sales you’d like to achieve, and the actual sales achieved.?By using this document, you can plan, spot dips in revenue and put actions in place to prevent that. This helps to monitor cash flow and can be used to plan your marketing activity. The trick with this though, is that it needs to be monitored regularly; I work with mine on a weekly basis. A sales plan is not a business plan! It is a living and breathing thing, it can be changed and amended, to reflect changes that happen.
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How social media stress can ruin your online presence - Samantha Cameron
During the pandemic, social media user activity increased from an average of two hours a day to seven hours a day. Social media became a lifeline for many during the lockdown and all of the social media platforms not only saw a huge increase in new users signing up but also inactive accounts being used once more.
Having access to so much information online through our social media platforms can contribute to our stress levels especially when we have so much to process which isn’t good for our mental health.
With fake news, people becoming experts in COVID-19 overnight and everyone having their own opinions on what was happening, it was a time where our mind space was taken over with things we wouldn’t normally deal with, and unfortunately we are not built to process all this information in a natural way.
Add into the mix having to deal with a new working environment such as working from home, meetings now online, children at home eating their way through the contents of the fridge like locusts, having to adapt our day to homeschool and literally having to change the way we spent our days, weeks and months. No wonder people have decided to leave social media and have an online break.
With everyday stresses and then adding the impact of what was on our social media during this time it would have had a negative effect on many of our stress levels, which isn’t healthy.
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The importance of personal KPIs in your business - Steven Mather
“I’ve got the key, I’ve got the secret, I’ve got the key to another way” – Urban Cookie Collective circa 1993 – no?you’re?old.
Anyway, I’ve got a key, one of many keys which make up success. It’s one of what I call the?Laws of Success.
Ok, let’s get a couple of things straight. One, I am not a business coach or your life coach and I don’t want to be either. Two, I’m a business lawyer so I’m going outside of my allocated pigeon-hole in writing this. Three, adopting this one philosophy may not change your life completely, but it sure will be a good start. Four, everyone’s definition of success is (and should be) different.
Peter Drucker, the world renowned business management guru’s, was the one of the first to write “what is measured is managed, and what is managed gets improved”. And so, in business,?Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)?have been a mainstay for the last few decades, as tools used to measure a wide range of vital business objectives. At a basic level, a business might have KPIs for things like: number of new clients, sales revenue, satisfaction scores. Boring spreadsheet stuff really, but a way in which managers can objectively compare staff and a method to see how units, teams or the whole company is performing.
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KPIs are great in business.
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Training – what’s the future? - Russell Parker ?? PRINCE2 and ITIL Training
The COVID pandemic was certainly something that brought change into all our lives and presented all of us with challenges in how we could still deliver value to our customers. Operationally, many businesses had to shift into new ways of working and communicating with existing or potential clients. Online communication platforms suddenly became the normal way of meeting and chatting with our networks both business and social to accomplish this.
As our clients tackled their own operational issues and preferred being in a room with other learners and the training consultant anyway, training demand just stopped overnight.
It took a few months for events to settle and the world to realize it could work and learn in other ways, so we started getting enquiries from several people wanting to take up some form of remote learning. From the conversations we were having a few common questions arose about what the differences are between a virtual course and an e-learning one.
Because they are both online so must be the same, right? No!
So here is a short guide to what both types of remote learning look like.
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Creating a strategy for your business - Paul Green
Strategy can be a scary word for a small business. However, having a clear strategy for the direction of your business can help you make clear decisions about where you want your business to be.
Putting together a strategic plan isn’t as difficult as you may think – it doesn’t have to be “War & Peace” and in some cases may even be condensed to a one-page basic outline of what you’re looking to achieve.
So let’s crack on and show you how to put one together.
Where we start may be considered a bit namby-pamby for a small business and you may see it as something for corporates: it’s creating your vision and mission! Now I appreciate that you may have worked for a bigger company. Often the vision and mission statements can be pretty meaningless; possibly because they have been created for the wrong reasons and don’t resonate with employees or customers.
Vision
Your vision should outline where you want your organisation to be or how you want to be perceived in the domain in which you operate – this could be an idealised view of the world from your perspective. It’s a long-term view and concentrates on the future. It could be the basis of why you’re in business.
The vision should –
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How are you coping with stress? - Dr AJ Yates
If personal development is a process of self-improvement, then I would argue that when it comes to personal development, the most important thing you can do is to find ways to look after your own well-being.?And well-being – both physical and mental – is certainly something that we are all becoming more aware of, with a plethora of articles, blogs, webinars and the like provided by any number of individuals and businesses – my own included.?But when talking to different people on this subject, I’m often struck that things I take for granted because of the field I work in, are not at all obvious to others. So for?this?article, I’m going back to basics to consider exactly what well-being is, why it’s important to you, and what you can do to improve it.
In terms of what it is, defining “well-being” can be problematic as (in academic research) there is no agreed definition of what the term well-being means other than the assumption that it is “a good thing”.?The reality is that most people think of “subjective well-being”, which focuses on themselves as an individual, and draws on their personal perception of what is important in terms of both physical and mental health.?In fact, some argue that when it comes to analysing well-being, happiness represents the truest measure.?Equating happiness to well-being is a key point, because it allows us to be in control of our own well-being, and boils down to the fact that you can increase your well-being by doing things that make you feel good.?It really is that simple.
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Spotlight On interview:? Kevin Robinson , Your-Copywriter.com
Kevin has been involved in writing for commercial marketing and sales, as an educator in colleges and universities and as a copywriter for business, for more years than he is prepared to discuss. His background in international sales and marketing channels and his training in creative writing underpin the ethos of Your-Copywriter.com.
The core vision is that we write words that work for you and the reader so we will never take a client we do not feel will benefit from our work. We are story based here at Your-Copywriter because we want your words to be read, not just fill a page.
Watch the video and learn more about Kevin's business journey plus some top marketing tips!