Last year saw businesses closing at the rate of around 100 a day, so it’s hardly surprising that the business community is being cautious about what is in store this year.

There may be signs that the economy is improving, but confidence among entrepreneurs remains shaky.

It is against this background that I am launching the Entrepreneurs’ Business Academy (EBA) to provide a forum where budding entrepreneurs can learn from the experts, network with their peers, and make their ideas a reality.

People may question the timing, particularly if 2010 turns out to be as volatile as forecasters suggest, but it will be a make or break year for a number of companies and I believe the academy will be capable of helping the seasoned business owner as well as up-and-coming entrepreneurs to weather the storms.

The academy will have the backing of high-profile entrepreneurs and experts and will provide the tools and a wealth of advice to those owners wanting a deeper insight into developing a successful company.

Yes I will be closely involved and will, for example, be talking about the techniques I employ to maximise sales, and the know-how to turn any business around.

I want the academy to provide an invaluable experience to emerging entrepreneurs, current owners of SMEs, professionals re-launching their careers, and ultimately, the man or woman with an idea, and the courage to make it a reality.

I was interested in a recent Dun & Bradstreet survey indicating that 90pc of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) fail because business owners lack all round knowledge about how to run the enterprise.

These disturbing findings show that the UK’s entrepreneurs still need a helping hand and with this in mind, I’d imagine any form of advice would be welcomed with open arms. After all, what entrepreneur can honestly say he or she knows it all?

The problem with being the boss is that there is no one to guide you and there’s a preconception rooted within entrepreneurs that asking for help signals failure.

It’s actually quite the opposite. Asking for advice in fact reflects a smart mind – one that will go far.

Even I’m still learning. At the age of 40 I went to Harvard to study the Advanced Management Program, a course that has proved invaluable. I’m still making use of the content.

It just goes to show you can never stop learning – irrespective of age or where you are in your career.

The EBA launches with the first event on March 20 when myself and my team of “Millionaire Mentors” will be making the first presentations.

There are still some spaces available. Details at www.the-eba.com

* James Caan is founder and chief executive of Hamilton Bradshaw and founded and ran recruitment group Alexander Mann between 1985 and 2002. Please send your questions to askjames@telegraph.co.uk

Nothing like a bit of blue-sky thinking to brighten business prospects. The General Election season is quickly gathering pace. The political parties are engaged in either leading with or misleading about their ultimate post-election intentions and plans.

Business organisations and lobbyists are mulling over the contents of their own manifestos. They face the same dilemma as the politicians, how to handle what could be a double-dip recession at a time when government spending and borrowing is out of control.

Business will be on the receiving end of whatever unpleasant tax or spending medicine is doled out, while the new administration will be looking to the industrial and commercial sectors to deliver the growth the economy so badly needs. Some task.

But it is not too late for business to go on the offensive and take the opportunity for a bit of blue-sky thinking in their wish list to the politicos.

The British Chambers of Commerce has taken a modest stab by suggesting a reversal of last year’s reduction in VAT and increase in National Insurance contributions (NICs).

It wants next year’s increase in NICs abandoned and a one percentage point increase in VAT substituted. In short, shift the tax-raising burden from employers and employees to consumers.

The arithmetic works in favour of business, representing a saving of £5bn against an additional £4.5bn yield from VAT – but as a well-known jingle points out, every little helps.

There is of course an element of special pleading in the Chambers’ submission and arguments for shifting the basis of one particular tax yield. Nonetheless, the suggestion marks a departure from manifesto convention.

Reductions in government spending along with less red tape and tax relief for the small businessman have traditionally been the staple diet in the business submissions around election time to the political parties.

There is scope for variations on the BCC theme. The credit crisis and the flow of so-called initiatives from Government after the banks put up the shutters to help small businesses raise finance was a combination of a knee-jerk reaction and do-goodery.

In the second year – or maybe third for some – of the credit crisis there are lessons to be learned from the failure of some of the schemes and the rules attached to them without producing another complex set of arrangements.

The age of the “big idea” may have been consigned to the “something to forget” in the history books, but perhaps the time is ripe for something more practical like giving small businesses a tax holiday to encourage more investment, start-ups and job creation.

The small business organisations and lobbies might also achieve more if they temporarily, at least, formed a coalition to make a joint submission. There should be strength in numbers.

http://www.workfromhomeinuk.com

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/

Just when you thought it was safe to come out into the open. As if it weren’t enough that the euro is crumbling, that the banking sector is still vulnerable; that Britain is steeling itself for its biggest spending squeeze in living memory, along comes Barclays Capital with some really bad news.

Having slid its slide rule over Britain’s demographics, it is warning that the real threat to the economy is not the fallout from the current financial mess, but the weight our ageing population will impose on the budget.

It is hardly a new warning: economists were getting hot under the collar about this decades ago. Back in the early 1990s it was all the OECD and IMF ever talked about. In a few years, they said, the baby boomers will retire and before you know it Britain, and for that matter most of the Western world, will see the proportion of its population in a retirement balloon.

The consequences are depressingly predictable: the budget deficit will climb higher and higher as those pensioners collect their retirement and medical benefits – all to be paid by a shrinking core of taxpayers.

The difference between then and now is that the squeeze is finally starting – this year, according to Tim Bond of Barclays. The bank forecasts that in a relatively short space of time, the interest rate on long-dated gilts – which in turn determine interest rates throughout the economy – will rise from around 4pc to well over 10pc. It is hard to overemphasise the significance of this sea change. Put simply, for the next decade, life will become increasingly expensive for the average household, squeezing ever deeper into their incomes. Standards of living will diminish.

The analogies with the financial crisis are plain to see: for years, Britons have lived beyond their means, financing it by, in effect, borrowing off future generations, whether through debt, by creating unrealistic pension obligations or social welfare systems that simply cannot be funded without an ever-greater contribution from the working population. Demographics is destiny, they say, and the statistics suggest the UK is destined for a major squeeze.

As if evidence were needed, it was provided in graphic form yesterday by BT, which admitted its pension deficit has now risen to a staggering £9bn. Shocking as this is, it is only a microcosmic example of what has happened across the UK and other Western nations over past decades. Once the financial crisis is well and truly over, the time will soon come for Governments to work out how on earth they intend to honour these unwise contracts without consigning vast numbers of their population to economic stagnation.

http://www.askhowtoearn.com

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/financetopics/financialcrisis/

Demand for rented homes is outstripping the supply of properties available to let, research claimed today.

Demand for rented homes is outstripping the supply of properties available to let following a rise in reluctant tenants, research claimed today.

The Association of Residential Letting Agents (Arla) said the number of homes available to let was falling, while demand for rented accommodation was rising as people struggled to find properties to buy or mortgages they qualified for.

Around 41pc of letting agents said there were more potential tenants than properties during the final quarter of 2009, up from 24pc during the three months to the end of September.

The situation is a marked turnaround from early last year, when the rental market was flooded with properties from so-called accidental landlords, as people who had been unable to sell their home while house prices were falling, were forced to rent it out instead.

But the number of accidental landlords has fallen in recent months as the property market has picked up, enabling them to sell their homes.

At the same time, many people who would like to buy a property are struggling to find somewhere suitable, due to the shortage of homes on the market, while others are unable to raise the deposits they need to meet the strict lending criteria of banks and building societies, forcing them to rent instead.

Around 54pc of letting agents said they thought consumers were being forced to rent a property rather than buy one.

The research also showed that the length of time for which a property is empty between tenants fell slightly during the fourth quarter to 3.9 weeks, down from four weeks during the previous three months.

Ian Potter, operations manager at Arla, said: “New tenants include those homeowners who were forced to sell their home during the last year either due to financial instability or a job move.

“And many people now in a position to buy are struggling to find the right property, as there is also a shortage of both properties for sale and realistic mortgages.”

But he warned that, while the private rented sector would be key to meeting the accommodation needs of future generations, it was likely to struggle without significant Government support.

http://www.workfromhomeinuk.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/

There are over eight million people who are “economically inactive”, a record number according to the Office for National Statistics.

These include students, retired, parents staying at home to look after children, long-term sick and those who have simply given up looking for a job – “discouraged” in the euphemistic language of the statisticians.

The 8.05 million economically inactive are on top of the 2.46 million unemployed. Together they represent 21.2 per cent of the adult population.

The increase in economically inactive people, especially the growing numbers of school leavers that decided to go to college rather than spend months looking for a job, are the main reason why the growth in unemployment has been held in check, according to experts.

Corin Taylor, policy director at the Institute of Directors, said: “The number of people working part time, and the number of economically inactive mask the true impact of unemployment.”

The number of people unemployed fell by 7,000 in the three months to November to stand at 2.47 million. Many economists are now hopeful that this recession will see far fewer unemployed than during those of the early 1990s and 1980s – on both occasions the total jobless figure broke through the 3 million barrier.

George Buckley, chief UK economist at Deutsche Bank, said workers were more willing to accept low pay and shorter hours in return for keeping their jobs, in contrast to previous recessions when companies were not so flexible.

“These figures are encouraging,” he said. “In previous recessions it took years for unemployment to stop rising, but that hasn’t happened this time.”

But many warned that families would feel the impact of lower incomes for many years to come, with a record 1.03 million working part-time because they were unable to secure a full-time job.

A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: “The fact that tens of thousands more young people are taking up the Government’s guarantee of a place in education or training means that they are getting the valuable skills they need to get into work.”

http://www.workfromhomeinuk.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/

The gap between public and private sector wages has hit a record level, according to official figures.

Workers in the public sector are now being paid more than £2,000 extra a year compared with employees in the private sector, after public sector pay continued to race ahead of inflation.

The average public sector worker was paid £23,660 a year, compared with private sector workers who were paid £21,528 a year, in the three months to the end of November.

This is the first time that the gap, which has slowly widened under the Labour Government, has hit more than £2,000 and came as figures showed that the discrepancy between pay increases in the public and private sector had never been so wide.

The data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) prompted experts to warn that so far the private sector had borne the brunt of the recession and that the Government needed to take action sooner rather than later to tackle the growing public sector wage bill.

“Public sector pay has exploded out of control,” said David Frost, the director general of the British Chambers of Commerce.

The figures were published as part of the ONS monthly update on unemployment and wages, with many pleasantly surprised that the overall unemployment figure had dropped a by 7,000 to 2.46 million for the three months to November. Some are hopeful that unemployment, which many feared could climb well above 3 million, could peak at little more than 2.5 million.

However, the data on wages were far less encouraging, with average pay increases across all workers increasing by just 1.1 per cent, the lowest level since records began nine years ago.

Nearly all of the increase came from the public sector, with nurses, teachers, civil servants and other public workers enjoying an average annual pay rise of 3.8 per cent in the three months to the end of November. Meanwhile private sector employees saw their salaries rise by just 0.2 per cent, as thousands of firms froze their workers’ pay as part of a desperate bid to cut costs in the recession.

This gap of 3.6 percentage points is the widest ever recorded by the ONS.

John Philpott, the chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said: “I can understand the unease many private sector workers feel when they see their contemporaries in the public sector not only getting better conditions and pensions, but also better pay.

“But everyone knows the public sector gravy train is going to be derailed.”

Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury Philip Hammond said: “We have the largest deficit in the G20 and no credible strategy to get a grip on it, which is threatening higher mortgage rates and higher borrowing costs.”

Experts gave warning that the dire state of the public finances meant that public sector pay increases had to stop.

Corin Taylor, policy director at the Institute of Directors, said: “The private sector has responded very flexibly to the recession by cutting pay and freezing wages. And that has helped people stay in a job.

“The public sector has got to follow suit. The Government has no choice. It is borrowing £178 billion this year and it is coping with the largest peacetime deficit. Something has to give. There will have to be a public sector pay freeze or public sector pay cuts. It will be painful but it is necessary.”

The public sector has continued to take on new workers in recent months, the statistics showed, with 6.09 million people employed by the taxpayer compared with 5.8 million a year ago.

Both the NHS and Jobcentre Plus have been hiring more people, even though Alistair Darling has admitted cuts will have to be made to the public payroll.

Over the last year, despite, last month’s recovery, 723,000 jobs have been shed from the private sector.

Mr Frost said: “This just isn’t sustainable. My members are telling me that they are losing workers to the public sector, because not only can they see the better holidays and pensions, but also now the better pay.

“The wealth-creating private sector is losing out to the public sector. And we will have to pay for this – through higher taxes. We’ve got to get a grip.”

For many years public sector workers were paid less than those in the private sector, with workers willing to accept lower pay in return for greater job security and better pensions. However in the last decade public sector pay has increased at a far greater rate, with GP partners now earning £107,000 a year and many head teachers in secondary schools paid more than £100,000.

Mr Philpott added that many of the most menial jobs in the public sector have been outsourced as part of Gordon Brown’s private finance initiatives, “leaving many in the public sector as well paid managers.”

http://www.workfromhomeinuk.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/

The rapid pace of technology is creating ‘micro-generations’, where teenagers are left behind by younger siblings, says James Delingpole.

My 11-year-old son, like all 11-year-old sons, thinks his Dad is incredibly, risibly out-of-touch. He mocks me for using words like “video” when I mean “DVD”, for preferring CDs to free downloads, for watching TV on the television instead of on the laptop, and for wearing my shirt with one top button undone when obviously it should be two.

But what the poor boy doesn’t yet realise is that the last laugh will be on me. Whereas it took me three decades to become the embarrassing fuddy-duddy I am now, he and his nine-year-old sister are going to be past their best in less than 10 years. Such is the weird side-effect of our fast-accelerating technology: you’re past it by the time you hit 20.

This phenomenon of the micro-generation gap – where 16 year-olds sneer at 19 year-olds for being oh-so-square, Daddy-O – came to light six months ago, in a widely publicised report written by a teenager on work experience at Morgan Stanley. Teenagers, revealed Matthew Robson (then 15), in a report named How Teenagers Consume Media, use their laptops as radios (streaming music from, say, Last FM so as to avoid adverts and DJ prattle), get round high cinema prices by watching pirated DVDs, prefer Facebook to Bebo, and never use Twitter, which they consider a hobby for old people like Stephen Fry.

The last two points came as an especial surprise to us oldsters, who imagined that teenagers Tweeted at least as regularly as we did, and that Facebook was more of a student-age thing while people of Robson’s age preferred MySpace. But we can hardly be blamed for failing to keep up with each tiny micro-trend: not when a new one seems to turn up every couple of years.

“People two, three or four years apart are having completely different experiences of technology,” Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project told The New York Times last week. “College students scratch their heads at what their high school siblings are doing, and they scratch their heads at their younger siblings. It has sped up generational differences.”

I’ve noticed this even in the tiny gap – exactly two years – between my younger children. Girl (9) is totally smitten with her Nintendo DS, as are most of her schoolfriends. Boy (11) considers that particular games console so impossibly uncool he won’t even borrow it. For him the only device worth having is an Apple iTouch, just like all his friends have got. This, I get the impression, has less to do with the joy of playing the games themselves than the matchless pleasure of running up huge and pointless bills downloading new apps from iTunes.

Before Boy and Girl came along I used to get all my techno advice from my stepson, Jim. But at 23, Jim is starting to seem dangerously passé. The other day we were playing on our new joint Christmas present to ourselves – Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 – on his Xbox, and wondering why the gameplay seemed to end after so few levels. After further inquiry Jim found the answer. “Hey, things have changed,” he said. “Nobody plays games on their own any more. They fight other people. On the internet.”

This is confirmed by research from Pew. Teenagers are much more likely to play online games than are twentysomethings (78 per cent versus 50 per cent), and also more likely to send instant messages (68 per cent versus 59 per cent). Which makes Jim as much a prisoner of his generation as I am of mine. Like so many kids of his era, he takes enormous pride in his ability to write text messages at high speed, because that’s what people born in the mid-Eighties trained themselves to do. When they hit their early teens and got their first mobiles, texts were the affordable alternative to phone calls, as well as the best way of communicating without being overheard by your parents.

For teenagers now, though, texting has been largely superseded by instant messaging – as Stephanie Lipman, a 17-year-old Londoner, explains. “I did text for a while, but instant messaging is so much better – like a constant stream-of-consciousness. You don’t have to bother with ‘Hello. How are you?’ or any of that. You just have this series of conversations with your friends which you can add on to when you’re in the mood.”

As Stephanie says, she just happened to be the right age for the right trend. Like most of her friends she subscribes to BlackBerry Messenger. When she was younger, BlackBerries were things that only businessmen had, but she came of age just in time to catch the tipping point for their transformation into the must-have teen accessory.

And what of the even-younger generations? According to Mizuku Ito, of the University of California Humanities Research Institute, they’ll make less distinction between online friends and real friends, and will be more discerning about what they choose to take from popular culture. And according to Larry Rosen, a California professor, they’ll be better at multi-tasking: his research has shown that 16 to 18 year-olds can perform seven tasks on average in their free time (texting, checking Facebook, watching TV, etc), whereas people in their early 20s can only handle six, while those in their 30s perform about five and a half.

My own prediction, from watching my 9 and my 11 year-old in action, is that kids will give up on conventional television. Boy and Girl now watch all their programmes via the internet on laptops, so that they can see exactly what they want when they want: Girl goes for Horrible Histories or cookery programmes on BBC iPlayer; Boy downloads the latest episodes of The Simpsons from the US. No one showed them how to do this, and they’re not especially techno-minded: they just intuited it in that scary way children do.

Will they all abandon printed books and start reading everything on Kindle? Or will it be the next micro-generation that does that? And will there be some kind of retro backlash where, in a statement of difference, kids start gravitating back to books and old-fashioned texting, or even vinyl LPs for their superior, warm, analogue sound?

The truth is we just don’t know, and anyone who claims otherwise is talking nonsense. As The Spectator’s techno guru Rory Sutherland, aka Wiki Man, points out, there’s not even consistency among age groups around the world. “For example, US kids were much earlier adopters of instant messaging than British kids, except in odd pockets like Cleveland, Ohio – where texting was huge. And in Japan eBay isn’t big, but Yahoo is colossal. And in Poland, they don’t Tweet, they Gadu Gadu, while in India and Brazil they prefer Orkut to Facebook.”

All we can say with confidence about future technologies is that they’re not going to be the disaster we Luddite oldies instinctively fear. (Remember the fuss about how texting was going to wipe out a generation’s literacy, thanks to abbreviations like gr8? These were largely an urban myth: hardly anyone used them, and those who did were shown by research to be children with the higher reading ages.) And that, in another couple of years, we’re going to find ourselves more passé than we could ever have imagined.

http://www.workfromhomeinuk.com/

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/twitter/

Designers have notched up bumper sales through an online shop by celebrating Christmas not once but three times last year.

Some 1,500 craft designers operating through Notonthehighstreet.com saw sales rocket from £2.3m to £6.4m in 2009.

Half of those sales came in the traditional run up to Christmas, but the website’s co-founder Holly Tucker, 32, said that key to the annual growth was the decision to invest in new catalogues for the first time that were circulated to more than 200,000 people in the spring and summer.

The summer months are traditionally slow for craft and gift designers while money has to be invested in stock to meet pre-Christmas orders. “We did Christmas in the middle of the year and that really helped to prop up the businesses,” said Ms Tucker. “It’s unheard of – that’s the drought and usually when businesses suffer enormously.”

The best selling designer on Notonthehighstreet, which features a range of crafts like handmade jewellery, personalised clothing and household gifts, saw sales jump 1,700pc last year.

“People were able to deal with the demand and scale their business with us,” said Ms Tucker. “People who you might not think could do it are now hiring warehouses, staff and moving out of their home. We are going to do six catalogues this year and the circulation is going to hit 3.5m.”

The company receives 30 applications a day from designers seeking to list their goods on the site. Around 93pc are rejected, Ms Tucker said, but the site has still expanded from representing 950 businesses to 1,500 in the last year.

Commission is charged on sales and to those businesses selected to appear in the catalogues.

Ms Tucker said the company, which has received investment by venture firm Spark Ventures and corporate backer Venrex, has exceeded its sales targets by £1m last year.

“The recession has probably hit us but we are growing so fast we are achieving anyway,” she said. “I think we’ve had a big impact on the industry. I say that because I have been involved in this sector for seven years and know it inside out. This is one of the most progressive and fast moving things to have happened to this sector.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/

Microsoft is placing big bets on Office 2010 changing life for small businesses.
Microsoft is shifting its focus from selling small businesses licences to install its software to a subscription model as it prepares for the launch of Office 2010. The biggest innovations in Office 2010 are associated with mobile phone and internet connectivity.

Robert Epstein, head of small business, Microsoft UK, told Your Business that he expected the addition of web-based applications to the Office range to radically change the way that small businesses buy and use IT.

The applications will let businesses access, edit and share their Word, Excel and Powerpoint files remotely through the internet even if the software is not installed on their laptops or smart phones.

A standard bundle of software, which includes hosted Exchange email that can be accessed via an internet browser anywhere, costs £6.71 a month with a 12 month contract. (e-mail only is £3.36)

Mr Epstein said Microsoft was “recommending” that all small businesses take a serious look at this way of buying IT and services rather than acquiring hardware like servers that had to be maintained.

”For a small business the obvious offering we are recommending is the online route,” he said. “It makes an awful lot of sense.”

”We could be aiming towards 20pc usage within 12 to 18 months in some shape or form,” he added.

Firms with security concerns about using software and saving data on an outside system may decide it is not appropriate, said Mr Epstein. Those that had paid for bespoke applications to work with their software are also likely to prefer to have the software installed on their own IT systems.

Analyst firm Gartner is predicting that working with internet-hosted software, known as Cloud computing, will be the hot technology trend in 2010, but Microsoft believes that most small businesses do not know about the potential. “The awareness of this is incredibly low. There’s a completely new way of acquiring and using IT,” said Mr Epstein.

Unlike some software service providers, Microsoft will allow businesses to use both installed Microsoft software and its software that is hosted on the internet.

It means that businesses could chose to move just new members of staff onto the online service rather than junking their existing systems overnight.

Microsoft has been selling web-based software to small businesses for some time, including its Microsoft Office Live Web software that lets firms create websites and, for a fee, access documents and manage customer information online.

But Mr Epstein said the latest updates now gave small businesses access to sophisticated business process tools in the office and remotely and the ability to better manage the demands of the increasing flow of information about customers and suppliers.

”It’s the big leveller for small business. That capability when the snow hits to convert that crucial meeting in room five to a video conference online with document sharing over your phone, web browser or PC,” said Mr Epstein.

Microsoft cut the cost of its existing subscription-based services by over 30% in November and has just announced lower than expected US prices for its five Office 2010 packages.

It was announced as new pricing and the change varied across the individual products. In a move that may appeal to start ups and home-based businesses, those buying Business and Office Professional are able to install the software on both their PC and laptops. However, only the entry level Office Home and Student version is available as a family pack, allowing usage on three PCs in one household. This version does not contain Outlook.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/

Doug Richard, the entrepreneur and former Dragons’ Den panellist who chaired the Conservatives’ small business task force, is to call for a complete overhaul of Government support for small and medium-sized enterprises.

In a manifesto for enterprise to be published this week, Mr Richard will say that present Government policies hinder innovation and stifle economic development. He said that the Government’s BusinessLink venture, which is supposed to support small and medium-sized enterprises should be dismantled.

“In America if you want to start a new venture, whether it’s the next Google or a laundromat, everyone cheers you on, in Britain you enter a Kafkaesque world of bureaucracy,” Mr Richard, who is American, said.

He called for the Government to rule that a specific proportion of its multi-billion pound procurement budget must be used to support small and new businesses, modelled on the small business set aside system in America, where up to 5pc of publicly funded projects have to be contracts signed with smaller companies.

Mr Richard, who was the guest of Ken Clarke, the shadow business secretary, at the Conservative Party conference last year, is an influential figure in Tory circles and it is thought that his manifesto will be seized on by the Tories to cut business red tape and quangos.

“You should be able to start up a business in an afternoon,” he said. “What we have at the moment is powerfully ineffective. We need to champion the pivotal place in society of entrepreneurs and the potential of social enterprise as a pathfinder out of recession.”

Mr Richard is the founder of School for Startups which trains entrepreneurs. Also, he is the co-founder of Cambridge Angels, a fund to support small technology start-ups.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/