A New Report on Startups from Lord Young

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RQhmOXhgNUY?rel=0] In his second report to the Prime Minister, Growing your Business: A report on Growing Micro Businesses, Lord Young highlights the increasing importance that micro businesses (those which have less than 10 employees) have on the success of the economy. You can read the first report here, which focuses on the first steps to starting your own business. 

Making up 95% of all businesses, Lord Young identifies that by helping startups develop their confidence and capability to grow, this also helps the UK to get ahead in the global race by supporting all the technological talent here.

Lord Young,  the Prime Minister’s enterprise adviser, said: "We have one of the best environments in the world for the creation of new firms. What this report endeavours to do is to help and encourage all those new firms to now take on their first employees and grow.

"Growing our smallest businesses would transform our economy — they are the vital 95%. If just half of the UK’s micro businesses took on an additional member of staff, unemployment would be reduced to almost zero. We need to raise the aspirations and confidence of these businesses and give them the tools to grow."

The Government hopes to help thousands of new businesses get off the ground by expanding their startup loan scheme. By opening up £230 billion worth of public sector contracts to small businesses, will help boost growth and transform the economy.

One of the most important changes he recommend is to remove the age cap for the loan, which is currently set at 30 years old. This would open the scheme up to entrepreneurs that would otherwise struggle to secure the necessary finance and support can benefit.

Also, Lord Young conducted a live webchat from 10 Downing Street this morning with Simon Finch of Finch Installations, who recently secured a £9,000 Start-up Loan, and Anthony Lau, founder of Cyclehoop and 2009 winner of The Pitch. They discussed how business owners can grow a successful company, and you can read it all here.

Competitions Can Help You Grow

WhichSocial, the software which allows you to measure and improve ROI from social media marketing, have a wide range of customers.  Their clients have a broad spectrum of social media activity, ranging from large brands with 75,000 Facebook followers, to small boutiques with a more select following.

One of their more exclusive customers, Me+Em, have been using WhichSocial to measure their competitions on Facebook.

Let's take a look at a recent competition they ran on Facebook called 'Share to Wear'. It encouraged users who have already liked the page to join in, creating a community, and by sharing the page allows potential clients to see the shop too. Using WhichSocial, Me+Em can also track how many clicks to the site this competition generated, which products were sold from these clicks, and which shared post generated the most interest.

Armed with this information, Me+Em have learnt enough to judge how, where, and when to run future competitions. They have data they need, but more importantly, they know exactly what to do with this data.

After they spoke at The Big Data Show, WhichSocial have been going from strength to strength, and are currently in conversation with even more brands. Keep checking the blog to see what they are up to!

HitMeUp Host Photography Competition

HitMeUp recently collaborated with the Red Gallery to help host their #R3D carnival in London. They took along the HitMeUp pin to see what mischief the revelers could create with it, and ran a competition for the best photo taken. There were some amusing entries, a few of which you can see below. To find out who won, check out the HitMeUp blog here.

A Few More Gems from Rory

After our group session with Rory earlier in the week, our heads were reeling with book recommendations, poignant questions, and telling quotations. Here are a few of my favourites.

1. Queuing for a nightclub is a good thing, queuing at the airport check-in is a terrible thing.

2. Pay the price of imperfection for the sake of clarity.

3. Our behaviour is not the product of our attitudes; our attitudes are a product of our behaviour.

4. Bright-line rules have their place in society, especially concerning tax evasion. 

5. All human choice is path dependent.

6. Everyone should read Nate Silver's book 'The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-But Some Don't'.

7. TripAdvisor is an example of a reputational feedback loop, where the consumer can only benefit as service gets better.

8. As the banking system has proven, you can't trust people who can't get hurt. We need a means of retaliation to develop any sort of trust.

9. Changing one little thing can have a hugely disproportionately effect, such as the $300 million button from a  large e-tailer.

10. The SCARF model, as shown below,  is a summary of important discoveries from neuroscience about the way people interact socially. The internet has the potential to tell us a great deal more about human behaviour.

Are Product Days Productive?

Sometimes you just need to knuckle down and get some work done. But what's the best way to do this? And what about all the other stuff you need to do before you can even start? Well, yesterday Seeker had a Product Day, and so I decided to catch up with the Founder and CEO, Daniel Wilson, to see how (and whether) it works.

1.       What is a product day ?

A product day is a full day when we step out of our regular roles to understand what we’ve got in the product, where we are as a business, and what we want to do over the next 3-6 months.  It gives us a chance to think about our tech and our customers at a higher level.

2.       Why did you arrange it?

The main point was to stop any silos of purpose and knowledge building up, as we’re all working semi-independently because there aren’t many of us.  We need to all be working on the same plan, or we won’t make the right sort of progress.

3.       What did you want to achieve from it ?

We took an inventory of features built, we planned the next 3 months major features to build (develop, or dev), everyone knows our goals around sales and investment

4.       What methods did you use and which ones work best?

We used lots of brainstorming, and we had bits of cardboard and sticky notes, which allowed us to move our ideas around afterwards into more logical groupings.  We used the important/urgent matrix (which is one of my very favourite things) to prioritise our work.

5.       What did you actually achieve?

A sense of purpose and a to do list.

6.       What's the next step?

Today the tech guys are sizing the dev work and planning iterations, and I’m starting to work on more heavily on our sales website, because we realised it was a major blocker to a lot of other work we wanted to do.

7.       Any advice you'd give to startups now in hindsight?

Do more prep than you were going to (My section on “state of the nation” was harder to talk through off the cuff than I had thought), and expect to go through fewer items in the agenda: This is really the time to have those discussions that normally get glossed over, e.g. what’s more important, a new feature or fixed bugs, or sales collateral.