How entrepreneurs can profit from the cuts

It is a well noted fact that in times of financial difficulty, a cry goes up from the socialists that claims that the rich get richer and the poor become poorer.

In difficult times, this is often very true – but for the right not the wrong reasons.

For entrepreneurs and people with legacy wealth, financial depressions, recessions or spending cutbacks are often seen as an opportunity and not a drag on their ambitio

Read full article: http://realbusiness.co.uk/leadership/how_entrepreneurs_can_profit_from_the_cuts

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The Essential Contents Of A Marketing Plan

(Excerpt from On Target: The Book on Marketing Plans by Tim Berry and Doug Wilson)

Every marketing plan has to fit the needs and situation. Even so, there are standard components you just can’t do without. A marketing plan should always have a situation analysis, marketing strategy, sales forecast, and expense budget.

• Situation Analysis: Normally this will include a market analysis, a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), and a competitive analysis. The market analysis will include market forecast, segmentation, customer information, and market needs analysis.
• Marketing Strategy: This should include at least a mission statement, objectives, and focused strategy including market segment focus and product positioning.
• Sales Forecast: This would include enough detail to track sales month by month and follow up on plan-vs.-actual analysis. Normally a plan will also include specific sales by product, by region or market segment, by channels, by manager responsibilities, and other elements. The forecast alone is a bare minimum.
• Expense Budget: This ought to include enough detail to track expenses month by month and follow up on plan-vs.-actual analysis. Normally a plan will also include specific sales tactics, programs, management responsibilities, promotion, and other elements. The expense budget is a bare minimum.

Are They Enough?

These minimum requirements above are not the ideal, just the minimum. In most cases you’ll begin a marketing plan with an Executive Summary, and you’ll also follow those essentials just described with a review of organizational impact, risks and contingencies, and pending issues.

Include a Specific Action Plan

You should also remember that planning is about the results, not the plan itself. A marketing plan must be measured by the results it produces. The implementation of your plan is much more important than its brilliant ideas or massive market research. You can influence implementation by building a plan full of specific, measurable and concrete plans that can be tracked and followed up. Plan-vs.-actual analysis is critical to the eventual results, and you should build it into your plan.

Courtesy of Palo Alto Software Inc

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Vince Cable gives Local Enterprise Partnerships the green light

Business secretary Vince Cable has given the green light to 24 proposals for Local Enterprise Partnerships, out of 62 bids submitted so far. Vince Cable also confirmed the Business Link service would be shut down by the end of 2012.

These are the first wave of proposed Local Enterprise Partnerships to be approved and asked to progress to the next stage and include Greater Manchester, Leeds and Liverpool city regions. You can view the full list here.

Local Enterprise Partnerships are partnerships between councils and local businesses, designed to replace the current Regional Development Agencies. The idea is that the councils and local businesses will work together to stimulate private sector growth.

Read full article: http://realbusiness.co.uk/leadership/vince_cable_gives_local_enterprise_partnerships_the_green_light

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Young Guns 2010 – celebrating the UK’s leading young entrepreneurs

Click on the image below to learn about the UK’s leading, young entrepreneurs:

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Bank lending criteria ‘too restrictive’

A report by the Bank of England revealed that net bank lending fell by more than £50bn in the past year, which has had the greatest impact on small firms. The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW) says the banks’ lending criteria is too restrictive for those companies.

Blue Tree Services, a small technology company that sells and manufactures tracking devices, has struggled to secure funding.

Co-director, Mike Smuts, said he believed that if they could secure a loan, the business could increase its turnover tenfold and create 50 new jobs. However, the firm has unsuccessfully applied for a loan of less than £50,000 with HSBC, NatWest and Lloyds TSB. They later applied for a reduced £20,000 loan but the assets required to secure the loan were unreasonable.

Read full article: http://www.growingbusiness.co.uk/restrictive-bank-lending-prevents-business-growth.html

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Email Marketing Solutions Your Must Have Check List

Looking for some useful software to help you develop your marketing plan? Please click on the image to find out more.

It’s time to launch your email marketing campaign; what should you know prior to setting your plan into motion? Well, before you do anything, you should first make certain that your sales staff and all sales departments are prepared to make the transactions generated by your email marketing campaign. Once your confident your business can handle a potential influx of sales, you should follow a few regimented steps to insure you’re making the most of your email marketing solutions. The below checklist will help you to determine what to do and when to do it.

Determine what day of the week to send your messages. The theories on this choice are numerous. Many experts suggest targeting individual customers over the weekend but business-to-business hopefuls on a Friday. However, a recent study indicates the best day to issue B2B email marketing messages is Monday or Tuesday. The truth is, there is no hard and fast rule for this factor. Do your own research to determine what day you think is best. Consider testing several days and determining which one gets the best response.

There are two times of day that are historically best for sending a marketing email, mid-morning and right after lunch. At these two times, people tend to be more receptive to what lands in their inbox.

After you’ve determined when and what time you’ll be sending your marketing email, you should prepare to monitor responses. Your monitoring efforts should cover everything from replies to unsubscribes. Monitoring your responses early can help you to eliminate and even avoid certain link and spam problems.

Now it’s time to deliver that email and the final step should be creating and email that is attractive, but not too “spam like” that customers will take time to read and find easy to navigate. An effective interface will enable you to track the results of your email campaign and move ahead as a result of that tracking.

Below you will find a summarized “tip list” derived from various email marketing experts. Take some time to review these tips and then be on your way to email marketing success.

• Offer something to your customers!
• In exchange for their contact info, offer your customers something in return. (i.e. a free newsletter, or seminar, or more information)
• Be economical about the info you gather!
• When gathering customer contact information, only ask for the information you need.
• Make it easy for them to unsubscribe!
• Make absolutely certain you provide a way for customers to unsubscribe from your e-mail marketing solutions campaign.

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Business Link to be scrapped “by end of 2012″

As part of the white paper on local growth, Vince Cable confirmed all regional Business Links will be closed down by the end of 2012.

The report says: “At £154m per annum, the costs of this support have been high and the generalist nature of these regional services means the support has often been poorly targeted, for example, towards so-called ‘lifestyle’ businesses that have no aspiration to grow.

“There are more efficient, effective and targeted ways to use public money to provide the kinds of business improvement help that businesses need”.

Read full article: http://realbusiness.co.uk/leadership/business_link_to_be_scrapped_by_end_of_2012

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