This article originally featured in the March edition of the Lancashire Business View
BY JIM FUREY, REGIONAL DIRECTOR, SKIPTON BUSINESS FINANCEWith a local working capital provider by your side you’ll have the chance to form a meaningful partnership with someone that will stick by your business.
Starting a business is hard. But keeping it going is even harder.
You’ve probably heard the stats about start-up failures. Apparently 8 out of 10 start-ups fail in less than two years according to Bloomberg.
They will be many complicated reasons.
An analysis published in Fortune magazine of over a 100 business post-mortem essays identified at least 20 different reasons.
When company directors do these three simple things they’re more likely to balance the books and keep business booming for the long term.
As well as running the day-to-day activities of a business, a company director has to keep an eye on the finances.
So, here are 3 things that successful directors do to help long-term success:
1 - They 'get' how to measure financial success
Is the practice of business finance too old fashioned for energetic start-up leaders? Or can new SME leaders learn the tricks of the trade that make companies profitable? At Skipton Business Finance, we believe they can.
For a long time the world believed that “you couldn’t teach an old dog new tricks”, meaning an incumbent would always be stuck in its ways and unable to change.
Many things changed for SMEs when the 2008 financial crisis hit. Some things were obviously catastrophic - job losses, business closures, the sharp decline in new start-ups.
But other outcomes were more subtle, like the increased struggle for small businesses to find new sources of working capital.