Category: News

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.

Small and medium-sized firms in Britain still type planning-suite names when cash is the problem that keeps them awake. A new analysis of UK search behaviour finds that demand for CRM and ERP software is running about 6.7 times higher than demand for the tools

Every small business is asked to do more with less. IT hardware rarely tops the worry list, but it should: the computers your team works on are a recurring, often underestimated cost — the purchase price, the electricity they draw, the desk space they occupy

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

Introduction: The Hidden Cost of Manual Finance Admin Invoice processing and expense administration are rarely the most visible parts of running a business, but inefficient processes can consume hours of staff time, delay approvals, and make it harder to see w

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

For twenty years, the small business search story was a story about money. Bigger competitors bought more links, published more content, hired bigger agencies, and occupied the first page. An independent firm could win a narrow local niche, but the broad comme

Think about the last time a company won a significant new customer. The sales process, the demo, the proposal, the negotiation. The onboarding. The first few months of the relationship, where every team is on their best behaviour, every response is prompt, eve

The UK has a large retail investment market, with FCA data showing that revenue from retail investment intermediation reached £6.5 billion in 2025. Trading and investing are now familiar parts of the financial market for UK consumers. Instant funding has

For any small or medium-sized business, sales management is a critical process that directly drives business growth. One of the biggest challenges SMEs face is a lead management process scattered across disconnected tools. A form here, a spreadsheet there, a N

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