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Forum - Small business trends in 2010
Small business trends in 2010
Thu, 14/01/2010 - 13:25 — SimonW
What are the trends that are likely to shape the way the UK's small firms operate in 2010? Here's just a few to think about:
* Cloud computing
* Greater use of social media
* More outsourcing
* Home business start-ups
And we've written about more in our article on small business trends. What do you think the major small business trends will be over the next 12 months?
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Hi, With all the pressures on cost cutting the public sector is going to take a whacking. Just in a recent poll councils based in England and Wales suggested on average they would see up to 25% cuts in budgets over the next three to five years. As with many area's of the the country and business as whole this can be good and bad depending on what sector your in. I work in the call centre industry providing 24hr telephone answering services for B2B. One would have thought that all these cuts would lead to a boost in outsourcing but thus far we are not seeing that. In fact one of the things that surprised me was when we approached third party lead generation companies was the current costs associated with such services and no guarantees! We have been seeing quotes of £1K set-up and £300-£400 per days for services which for small business is ludicrous. As with Google adwords that's really just become a large drain for you to pour money down these days. The art of getting leads is becoming a very specialised arena and numerous techniques are beginning to take over the more conventional ones. Just having a website is no longer any good, it would appear you need to be tweeting, on Facebook, plus numerous other mediums, all of which can be a challenge for small business as it demands time to do all of these things. I would be interested in hearing any feedback on what experiences anyone has had with third party lead generation companies.
Thanks John
Phoenix24-7 24hr Telephone answering services
All very exciting, but the other trends do not make such happy reading. The public sector will enter the normal state of limbo that accompanies any election, followed by another limbo while the new government takes over. So any small business that depends on a flow of new projects from the public sector will be in trouble.
Meanwhile the public sector will continue its policy of "safety first, small businesses second", relying on mammoth companies such as Capita and Serco to run the main outsourced contracts. Capita and Serco are then free to use whichever (smaller) suppliers they want at whatever price they can negotiate, sidestepping the hugely costly process of conventional public sector tendering for all the smaller contracts that cascade down from those main contracts. It's actually a very effective system from the taxpayer's point of view in my experience (but that's a topic of discussion of its own). The US approach of mandating 5% of all public sector contracts to small businesses (like ours) sounds great, but I'm not sure how well it works in practice. I know that Doug Richard is a big fan of it, so maybe we'll see the Conservatives try this one out.
2010 will be the Year of Collaboration for small businesses: in this difficult market, our survival might just depend on it.
Collaboration has been much talked about in the last few years (e.g. 'Collaborative Innovation' was a key theme at the Davos Conference back in 2008). This year I think the concept will mature and take hold in the UK small business community - with collaboration between companies, between competitors, between customers and providers.
This is partly out of necessity, and partly because of the increasing take up of innovations such as social networking: we expect to participate and work together more closely in a new networked world.
I've seen this recently amongst my own small business clients. I've just completed a large tender for a consortium of independent SME recruitment consultancies bidding to provide services into government. Anyone who knows the recruitment industry will know how competitive companies are in this sector. There is no way on earth that competitors would have collaborated like this a few years back, but attitudes are changing.
Small businesses have an advantage over larger ones here. They are inherently more flexible and willing to collaborate and this will get results. Large businesses could learn alot.
As Charles H Green, co-author of the brilliant book 'The Trusted Advisor' states - "businesses have to get better at playing with others in the sandbox'".
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