Running a business

Staff, premises, contracts, customers and the hours. The parts of running a business that nobody warns you about until they have already happened.

Maternity leave in a firm of five. A year of leave in a firm of five sounds unaffordable until you work out what you can reclaim and how much notice you actually get. It is a planning problem, not a crisis.
TUPE, and the staff who come with the keys. You negotiated hard on stock and fixtures. The staff came across automatically, on their existing terms, with their existing claims, and you never priced any of it.
Getting a disciplinary right. Most unfair dismissal claims are not lost on the facts. They are lost because somebody decided on Tuesday and held the hearing on Thursday.
References, right to work, and the checks that are not optional. A right to work check takes about four minutes and protects you from a penalty running to tens of thousands of pounds per worker. Most employers do it wrong anyway.
The rota that quietly breaks the law. The 48 hour limit is an average, which is why the rota that looks legal in any given week can still be unlawful across seventeen of them.
How firms underpay the minimum wage without meaning to. Nobody in the public naming lists set out to underpay. They deducted for a uniform, or did not pay for the ten minutes before the doors opened.
UK GDPR for a business with eleven customers. You do not need a data protection officer or a forty-page policy. You need to know why you hold each thing, how long for, and what you do in the seventy-two hours after a laptop goes missing.
Registering a business name is not protecting it. Companies House accepting your name means one thing only: no other company has that exact name. It says nothing about whether you are allowed to trade under it.
Terms that mean something when it goes wrong. Terms on your website do not bind a customer who never saw them. What has to be on the quote, and which clauses actually survive a dispute.
A business plan you would actually use. A forty-page plan impresses nobody. A one-page summary, a bottom-up cash flow and an honest assumptions sheet will get further with a lender.
The five numbers worth a whiteboard. A dashboard with forty numbers on it gets read once. Five numbers on a whiteboard, reviewed every Monday, changes what people do.
Business energy, and the contract you were rolled into. Business energy has almost none of the protection domestic supply has. Miss the renewal window and you find out what deemed rates cost.
Fitting out an empty unit. The landlord hands over a shell with a concrete floor. Everything between that and opening is yours, and it takes twice as long as the programme says.
Handing the business to somebody else. Nobody plans an exit in the year they want one. The three routes out of a British business, what each asks of you, and why five years is the minimum run-up.
The first year of working for yourself. You started in June, invoiced in July, got paid in September, and the tax on it is due in the January after next. That gap is where most people come unstuck.
Day rate, or price the job. Two quotes for the same bathroom: £280 a day for eight days, or £2,400 for the job. One of them means you keep the risk and one means you sell it.
Where the first ten customers come from. The first ten customers almost never come from advertising. They come from eleven people who already know you, and one job done properly enough to be talked about.
The customer worth losing. One customer is worth £8,000 a year and pays at ninety days. Another is worth £3,200 and pays on the fifteenth. Work out which one you would rather lose.

Running a business

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