Running a business in Britain, page 14
246 articles on what it actually takes to run a business in Britain: VAT, staff, rent, rates, tenants, stock and sites. From the studio that simulates it.
- Starting in 1971, the year the money changed. Every price in the shop had to be rewritten, and the smallest ones could not be converted exactly. That argument at the counter lasted a decade.
- The three day week, and trading on two of them. From 1 January 1974 a firm got electricity on three consecutive days a week. You could not work harder round that, which is what made it different.
- Big Bang, and the decade that followed it. A printer in Croydon was offered a £40,000 overdraft he had not asked for. That, not the trading floor, is what deregulation looked like from outside London.
- Black Wednesday, and rates at fifteen per cent. Base rate went to 12% before lunch and 15% was announced in the afternoon. A joinery firm in Reading had done nothing wrong and paid for all of it.
- 2008, when the lending stopped. The print firm had customers, orders and thirty years of trading. What it did not have, from November 2008, was an overdraft.
- The year everything shut. The pub took £2,900 on the Friday and nothing at all for the next eleven weeks. What arrived instead was a grant based on its rateable value.
- Fifty towns, and why those fifty. The same unit, the same trade, the same year. In one town the rent is £9,000 and in another it is £31,000, and that is before anybody has sold anything.
- 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.
- The founder is a single point of failure. Ask what happens to the business if you are in hospital for a fortnight. If the honest answer is that it stops, you do not own a business yet.