Blog

It’s been that time of year again, when we pore over the New Year’s’ Honours list to see who has been awarded what, and whether we agree! “Honours” are used to recognise merit in terms of achievement and service, and in this year’s list 1,196 people were awarded honours. Their areas of involvement and stages […]

As we herald the arrival of 2016 you probably have great plans for your business! As everyone around us making New Year Resolutions, it’s the ideal time to look ahead with confidence and take some positive steps to making things happen the way you want them to. Newspapers, magazines and blogs are full of encouraging […]

These days we keep hearing about “crowdfunding”. In this article we look at what it is and whether it has a role to play in small business funding. Crowdfunding is a way of raising funds by asking as many people as possible to contribute a small amount of money to a project or cause. It […]

Friday 27th November is Black Friday! An American tradition, it has gathered momentum in the UK over the past 2-3 years. But what is Black Friday and why is it relevant to your business? Black Friday is the Friday after Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Thanksgiving is always the fourth Thursday of November so […]

A report recently published by Goldman Sachs, British Business Banks and Enterprise Research Centre, Unlocking UK Productivity shows that SMEs may be the key to economic growth in the UK.   Productivity is ultimately how efficient the firm is, how much output for a given level of input, which is measured in GDP per hour […]

As a small business owner, you may be at the stage where you are thinking about expanding your business. It’s a huge decision! There’s the old saying “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”! If things are going well as they are, and you are increasingly able to blend the needs of the business into […]

Fair Business Loans are delighted to announce that we have recently been added to the Alternative Business Funding website. Alternative Business Funding features a growing collective of lenders of unsecured business loans who are pooling together to provide a broad range of options to UK businesses who have been unable to access traditional mainstream finance. […]

Dragons Den is once more gracing our screens on Sunday evenings, this time with three new dragons – Nick Jenkins, Sarah Willingham and Touker Suleyman – joining the two remaining original dragons Deborah Meaden and Peter Jones. The aim is for entrepreneurs to pitch their business idea to the dragons, in the hope of gaining […]

In a recent blog we featured the potential benefits to small businesses outlined in the Queen’s Speech. But what did the recent budget deliver for small businesses? Let’s take a quick look! First the good news! There are three changes that will be of benefit to most small businesses: The Annual Investment Allowance (AIA) – […]

In February we ran a blog entitled Does Your Business Need The Fixer which referred to the BBC 2 programme called The Fixer. In this programme hotelier Alex Polizzi spends time in a struggling small business to make recommendations as to how it could be improved. In a recent interview with The Radio Times, Polizzi […]