Business advice overload?

Buy! Sell! Save! Spend! Stand up! Sit down! Ok, we’ll stop there. Although we could go on. There can rarely have been a time when there was quite so much business advice around. Flying in from all corners, this veritable tsunami of tips, hints and advice for SMEs, rather than help, can be utterly confounding if you are trying to take time, under increasing pressure, to make the right decisions for your business.

Two government business support sites have produced some excellent, accessible advice which, if you don’t already know about them, could prove very useful.

1. The Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (BERR) runs the Action for Business programme, the focus of which is to help steer British business through the economic downturn. It has produced a rather helpful summary of the recent government measure around financial and other business support recently announced and helps unpick how these translate into real, accessible support for you and I.

Find out more from their website: http://www.berr.gov.uk/aboutus/corporate/performance/actionforbusiness/index.html

2. Businesslink’s Real Help for Business Now initiative expands on the relevant, sensible help theme and has produced a summary of FAQs in a bid to help tackle some of the $5M questions that many SME owners are chewing over at the moment. Areas addressed include:
• How to save money
• Managing your cashflow
• How to get more time to pay your tax bill
• How to keep staff on and improve productivity
• Alternatives to redundancy

These are easy to read, helpful and importantly, all in one place. Ideal if you need sensible, relevant business advice. Find out more at:

http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=1081750153&type=ONEOFFPAGE&site=0&furlname=realhelp&furlparam=realhelp&ref=http%3A//www.berr.gov.uk/&domain=www.businesslink.gov.uk

[Tailored] Time for your business MOT?
Finally, we have been able to help many of our clients with our own Tailored Time business MOT service, which offers a fresh, independent pair of eyes on your business planning for the year ahead. Contact Sarah on 0845 075 1044 or visit www.tailoredtime.com/newyear2009 to find out more.

Please share!
As always we’re keen to hear from you - either if you’ve some recommendations of your own to share or have feedback on any of the above. We look forward to hearing from you.

TT