Category: Business Advice

Late payment remains one of the heaviest drags on UK businesses. According to Department for Business and Trade research, it costs the UK economy almost £11 billion a year and affects more than 1.5 million businesses – firms waiting on cash they ha

Small sales teams often learn on the job. A new starter shadows a colleague, listens to a handful of calls and then starts speaking to customers. Coaching happens when the owner or sales manager has time. That can leave some reps with regular feedback and othe

How Finance Automation Cuts Invoice and Expense Administration Introduction: The Hidden Cost of Manual Finance Admin Invoice processing and expense administration rarely attract much attention, yet inefficient workflows consume staff time. Manual data entry, a

How UK Small Businesses Can Use Video Advertising to Compete With Bigger Brands Video used to be a luxury reserved for national campaigns and agency budgets. That gap has closed fast. UK video ad spend reached £9.3 billion in 2025, up 20% year over year.

Especially among SMEs, outsourcing is becoming more commonplace; here, Michelle O’Connor – Chief People Officer at Hive Support Services – discusses the benefits of doing so, alongside some of the challenges her team is seeing across the UK business sect

For a long time, payments were treated as a back-end problem: pick a processor, integrate it, move on. That assumption held while everyone did roughly the same thing — card payments, one or two acquirers, a standard checkout. It stopped holding once mark

Many small businesses run on spreadsheets longer than they should. In private healthcare, the same pattern often appears inside prescribing operations. At the start, a spreadsheet can feel practical. It helps a small team track patients, prescriptions, payment

A practical guide to the Level 4 AI & Automation Practitioner Apprenticeship Most SMEs have already tried AI. Staff use ChatGPT or Copilot, someone has built a useful prompt, and a few tasks take less time. What usually hasn’t changed is the process

A spreadsheet can serve a small UK brewery when the product range is limited and a few people know what is stored where. As the brewery grows, more batches, seasonal lines, customer orders and storage locations mean more stock information has to be kept accura

For many people, their tools are their livelihood. Plumbers. Electricians, carpenters, gardeners, mechanics; without their tools, their jobs become impossible. And if things go wrong, it’s often not a case of simply buying more.

In this exclusive interview with the AI Speakers Agency, Maarten explains why AI programmes fail, which foundations determine whether a company is AI-ready, how leaders can test value before committing to large projects, and how his AI Navigator Framework move

That’s the paradox of small business. You’re very good at generating demand. Google Ads, SEO, social media, directories, local advertising, and digital sales funnels. But once you make the phone ring, you don’t have the capacity to answer it.