Product Description

This one-stop handbook covers everything you need to know: starting out; making your business special; people; enterprise for beginners; marketing; cash management; finance; innovation; export know-how; risks and rewards; avoiding the pitfalls and moving on.Packed with case studies from an enormous variety of businesses, this book draws extensively on the stories of successful entrepreneurs from Financial Mail's unique Enterprise Awards programme, It also covers the issues that everyone with their own business should and must consider, from how to get paid promptly (and what to do if not) to advertising, personnel, the business implications of the euro and how to get investment for future growth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #765973 in Books
• Published on: 2001-08-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Synopsis
This one-stop handbook covers everything you need to know: starting out; making your business special; people; enterprise for beginners; marketing; cash management; finance; innovation; export know-how; risks and rewards; avoiding the pitfalls and moving on. Packed with case studies from an enormous variety of businesses, this book draws extensively on the stories of successful entrepreneurs from Financial Mail's unique Enterprise Awards programme, It also covers the issues that everyone with their own business should and must consider, from how to get paid promptly (and what to do if not) to advertising, personnel, the business implications of the euro and how to get investment for future growth.

About the Author
Ruth Sunderland is an award winning author, one of the foremost names in business journalism and has unrivalled experience of reporting on fast-growth companies. She is currently Chief City Correspondent at the Daily Mail and previously worked as Business Editor of the Financial Mail on Sunday.

Excerpted from "Financial Mail on Sunday" Complete Guide to Running Your Own Business by Ruth Sunderland. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Growth Is Good

It is Enterprise which builds and improves the world’s possessions ... if Enterprise is afoot, wealth accumulates ... and if Enterprise is asleep, wealth decays...

John Maynard Keynes, Treatise on Money.

Entrepreneurs are the new frontline troops for Britain’s new economy.

Tony Blair

This book is for anyone who is serious about owning or working for a true growth business.
Many people dream of making millions by making a success of their own business venture, and then retiring after a few years to the Bahamas.

The reality is that on the road to growth, entrepreneurs will work very hard, take nerve-racking risks and surmount many difficulties. Many will fall by the wayside and only the most talented, determined and best-prepared will make the grade. Even if you do succeed, getting rich is far more likely to happen gradually, after years of hard graft and ploughing profits back into the company, than it is to occur overnight.

The business world is changing rapidly. Entrepreneurs today must contend with new technology, e-commerce, fresh competition, new regulations and a host of other challenges. It is also becoming more competitive. In today’s world of global commerce, firms face rivalry not just within the UK, but from the rest of Europe and beyond.

Here at Financial Mail on Sunday, we meet and talk to hundreds of businessmen and women, from the bosses of FT-SE 100 companies to entrepreneurs running the tiniest firms, along with leading experts at the UK’s biggest banks, accountancy firms, venture capitalists and business advice agencies. Financial Mail also runs a unique Enterprise Awards programme, specially designed to encourage, recognise and reward growing businesses. This has given us an unrivalled insight into the secrets of success behind Britain’s fast-growth firms, the pitfalls they face and the hurdles they must overcome.

Encouraging enterprise and growth matters to all of us, because fast-growing, flexible companies are the engine of the UK economy. We depend on them increasingly for jobs, for the innovations that improve our lives and for our ability as a nation to compete on the global stage.

Thirty years ago, most of the working population expected ‘jobs for life’, climbing tortuously up the career ladder at a big corporation. The shift away from old, male-dominated heavy industries in the Eighties has been painful for many, but has also transformed the economic landscape. We are all now likely to be involved in enterprise at some stage in our working lives, as an entrepreneur ourselves, or as an employee, customer or supplier of a growing business. Official statistics bear this out.

By the late Nineties there were an estimated 3.7 million businesses in the UK, according to the Department of Trade and Industry. That is 1.6 million more than in 1980 – and 99% of those businesses were classified as small firms with fewer than fifty employees, accounting for 45% of private-sector jobs and 40% of private-sector sales.1

In 1998, small firms created 1.64 million new jobs and those in their first year of trading generated sales of more than £58 billion.2

Enterprise has been a liberating force for many. Talented individuals no longer have to spend years engaging in office politics in the hope of clawing their way to the top of a large company, but are opting to build their own businesses instead. The UK’s embrace of the enterprise culture has also given opportunities to many people who may have been held back by prejudice or rigid structures in the traditional workplace. Almost a third of new firms are set up by women, while mature business people aged over fifty and ethnic-minority entrepreneurs account for almost 20% of small and medium enterprises between them.

Anyone can run a growth business, whether he or she is old or young, black or white, male or female – provided that person has the drive, the skills and the right advice. This book aims to be a straightforward practical guide, with case studies drawing on the experiences of real companies, for those who are truly committed to growth. It will guide entrepreneurs from the exciting start-up stage, through early growth, consolidation, maturity and exit routes, examining key areas such as marketing, the Internet, finance for growth and dealing with risk. It will also focus on the often neglected human issues involved in running a successful growth business, such as stress, balancing work and family life, and giving staff a stake in the business.

While it cannot hope to address every point that will arise on the road to growth, it will try to point the reader to sources of further expert help and advice. We hope that using it will help you grow your business into a powerhouse for the future.