I keep talking about this idea of a grown up business, and it’s one which seems to resonate with a lot of the business advice clients I work with. But what do I mean by a grown up business, and why would you want to be one?

Photo by M.C.P.

The features of a grown up business

A grown up business is one where the owners have decided that they’re going to do things properly. They’re going to have proper systems which can cope with more customers and more work. A grown up business will probably have employment contracts for the staff and freelancer agreements for the associates. They’ll probably be using a proper accounts package, and maybe getting a bookkeeper to do all the numbers for them.

A grown up business is focussed on making decent money

They’re going to make some serious money, whatever that means to them. For some of the businesses I work with this means building a business worth a few million, and for others it can mean getting to an income of 50-60k pa.

Not doing all the work yourself

The owners in a grown up business will be delegating some, or all, of the work to other people, so that they can concentrate on growing the business. They’ll be focussing on supporting the other people in the business so they can do their job well, co-ordinating all the activities, and taking responsibility for the sales and marketing.

Do you want to be a grown up business? Meet me for a coffee and a chat, and let’s see how we can get you there.

I’m going to be writing a series of blog posts on how to get money into your business.  If you’re going along quietly and have no plans to grow your business, or you have all the money you need, then I wouldn’t bother reading for a couple of weeks.  If, however, you’re interested in getting some tips on how to fuel your business growth strategy with some hard cash, then keep in touch, as there will be some good things coming out.

If you’re ready to have a grown up business and need some investment or some extra working capital, I’ll be looking at some different ways to bring money into your business to help it grow and flourish.

• Why you need money to grow – this isn’t as obvious as you might think
• The organic cashflow strategy
• The outside investor strategy
• Getting the bank to pay up

If this sounds like your sort of thing, then make sure that you’ve signed up to get the blog posts fresh off the press.  In fact, it would be lovely if you’d like to subscribe (by RSS, twitter, email, pigeon post…) and keep in touch anyway.  You never know what might help you to discover the Joy of Business.

photo by community friend

On Monday I’ll be representing the Brighton and Hove business community at the inaugural meeting of the Living Wage Commission, organised by the city council, so I want to get your thoughts before I go along.

What’s the living wage?

The idea of the living wage is that everybody in the city should be paid enough to live on.  Nationally, this has been calculated as £7.20 per hour, although bizarrely the figure suggested for Brighton is £7.19 per hour.  This is is more than the national minimum wage of £6.08 per hour. While the minimum wage is a legal requirement – you can’t pay your staff less than this, the living wage can’t be enforced.

Why might we need one for Brighton?

Brighton has some of the lowest wage levels in the South East.  This, together with the high number of students in the city, silly house prices and 3-4% unemployment means that we’re not a rich city compared with our neighbours.  All of this has an effect on the health of local businesses, which is my concern.  Businesses which sell to consumers in Brighton find it difficult because there’s not a lot of money circulating in the economy.  Businesses which sell to other businesses can find it difficult to charge good rates, unless you sell to London or the rest of the UK.

There’s an argument that raising wage levels would mean that there’s more money in the local economy, which would then be spent locally, helping us all.

But wouldn’t a living wage be expensive for businesses?

When I’ve been talking to other people about the idea of a living wage, some business people have been horrified by the idea of wage rates as low as £7.19 per hour.  In the knowledge sectors (consultancy, digital, medical technology, education etc) this is a pretty low figure.  Not many web design companies pay their staff on rates this low. But other sectors such as tourism, entertainment (pubs, clubs, restaurants) and agriculture pay the minimum wage, and find it difficult even to pay this amount, because their margins are very low, and because wage rates are traditionally low in these sectors.  It’s interesting to note that these are the sectors which find it difficult to attract and retain staff and often rely on young people, part timers, and people from overseas.

If you can’t enforce it, what’s the point?

That’s a good point, although you could argue that the national minimum wage isn’t really enforced very well anyway, but most employers accept that you have to pay this.  I think that for a living wage to work, you’d have to make it aspirational, so that businesses want to pay this.  I was talking to one of my lovely clients about whether they should take on an intern, and I commented that most people like to pay their interns at least minimum wage.  Because 30 minutes earlier, we’d been talking about the idea of the living wage, he immediately responded that he’d pay his intern the living wage.  By sowing the seed of the living wage, he’d taken this on board, and wanted to pay it.

Let me know what you think

These are some of my ideas about the living wage – let me know what you think and how it might work in your business so I can point your views forward on Monday.

Some of you may have seen the debate raging recently on Twitter about the best place in Brighton (and Hove, of course) to buy ice cream.  After exhaustive work by all the people who sent in the ice cream experiences, the most popular vote went to Boho Gelato in Pool Valley.  There were honourable mentions for Marocco’s by the King Alfred, and Scoop and Crumb.  I disallowed any contestants who sell frozen yoghurt, as that’s not ice cream as I know it.

Why have I been talking about icecream?  Is it a summer frenzy?  Have I given up chocolate?  No, I just needed a link from this article about business networking.

But if you have ice cream opinions, are one of my London clients and prefer the giddy heights of Fregoo’s or other London ice cream establishments, or have something interesting to say about where business and ice cream mix (or should that be melt) do let me know.

I’m just going to have a quick rant.  Then it’s over, I promise.

I use LinkedIn as one of my essential business tools for networking.  I pretty much use it everyday.  I check out prospective clients, keep up with what’s going on, follow discussions in a number of groups, and have most of my network of business colleagues, suppliers, business advice clients on LinkedIn.

And I get lots of invitations to connect.  A good handful every week.  Some of them are very nice, people say hi, and tell me something about why we might want to connect.  But lots of these invitations are just the standard “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn.”

And that annoys me. If you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, that should be because you want to keep in touch and forge a long lasting relationship using the magic tools of LinkedIn.  So if you want a long lasting relationship, where perhaps we can help each other out on the often difficult road to business success, why not take a couple of minutes to say hello.  Don’t just press a button, and expect a relationship.  I’m not a vending machine – you can’t just press “Add Julia to your network” and expect me to be your friend.

It takes more than that.  I’m worth more than that.  And so are all the other people in the network you want to build up.

I’m neither a stamp nor a butterfly

People are not objects to add to your collection.  Relationships take time and effort to nurture.  I’m not a stamp or a butterfly for you to add to your collection.

photo by frontenddeveloper

I’m more of an exotic orchid, and if you want our friendship to blossom you’re going to have to put in a bit more of an effort than that.

photo by pipestone

Rant over

If we’ve met and you would like to stay in touch on LinkedIn, please do invite me.  I’ll be happy to be your LinkedIn buddy – but say hello first.

Other posts about LinkedIn

Here’s a more indepth guide to using LinkedIn for business and a different rant about why I get random invitations (or spam) on LinkedIn