In through the outfield

20 September 2010

FAQs when considering the correct legal form for your business

I have previously blogged on how to Get Legal Clarity on what type of company you should form, and now James Quinn has kindly sent in a list of ten frequently asked questions (FAQs), when customers are setting up in business.

FAQs when considering the correct legal form for your business:

1. Do I need to register a sole trader business and its name?
No, if you decide to establish as a sole trader then there is no requirement to register your business to bring it into existence, just start trading (the equivalent for companies is registration at Companies House). However, you must inform HM Revenue & Customs of your self-employed status (information on the pros and cons of setting-up as a sole trader).

2. How much does it cost?
The legal expenses involved in setting up a company are great – the cost of forming a standard limited company is low and the ongoing compliance costs are usually negligible. The single largest expense of operating a company is accountants fees – companies are required to file accounts annually with Companies House. Although technically you could prepare these accounts yourself, it would be inadvisable.

3. Can I use my home address as the registered office of my company?
Yes, although this means that your home address will appear on the public register.

4. Do I need more than one person to form a company?
No, you only need one person. Private limited companies can be formed with one director and one shareholder (who can be the same person).

5. Will running my business as a sole trader gives me more flexibility?
Whilst it may be true that operating as a sole trader allows you to run your business more informally, that does not always equate to flexibility. For example, operating as a company certainly allows you a great deal more flexibility when it comes to seeking investment or on the sale of your business.

6. Does a company require a secretary?
No, since 8 April 2008 private limited companies no longer require a secretary (unless, exceptionally, their Articles of Association state otherwise).

7. Do directors and shareholders have the same role?
This is not the case. Directors are responsible for the ‘day to day’ running of the company; and shareholders ‘own’ the company and are primarily involved in major decisions concerning the company’s structure and constitution. The directors and shareholders in smaller companies are often the same people, but it is important to remember that they have different roles and responsibilities depending on whether they are acting as a director or shareholder in relation to a particular decision.

8. Is there a lot of paperwork associated with a company?
There is some additional paperwork compared to a sole trader business, such as filing an annual return and accounts (although all businesses should keep accounting records in any event). A company also has to keep Company Registers of shareholders, directors, directors residential addresses, secretaries (if you have one) and charges but these are usually provided on formation and only require updating if there is a relevant change – for example if a director resigns.

9. Do I need a Shareholders’ Agreement?
No, you are not legally obliged to enter into a shareholders’ agreement when forming a company. However many businesses with more than one shareholder choose to do so in order to protect their investment in the company and to help resolve any disputes which may arise (Legal Clarity have published a free guide on shareholders agreements).

10. Do I have to publicly disclose each director’s residential address?
No, since October 2009 directors, shareholders and other officers of the company may provide a ‘service address’ for the public register in place of their residential address.

You can get additional guidance from the Legal Clarity website:
What type of company?
A gentle introduction to private limited companies
Obligations after formation

16 September 2010

Understanding the value of your intellectual property – one day event

An almost universal issue for both start-up and existing businesses who we see in the Business & IP Centre, is their lack of awareness and understanding of the value of their intellectual property (IP).

Whatever your business, you will almost certainly have more assets than you know of. What about your name and logo, your brand, maybe even the design of your products. Having a proper understanding of your IP means you can make it work for you as your business grows.

So my colleague Clare Harris has created a one day event designed to give practical advice on commercialising, financing and selling your IP.

Speakers range from legal experts to successful inventors, with a key note speech from Julie Meyer.

Julie is the Founder and Chief Executive of Ariadne Capital, an investment company which backs entrepreneurs. Ariadne’s recent successes include Espotting [now MIVA], Kashya [sold to EMC], and Skype [sold to Ebay]. Before founding Ariadne, Julie founded First Tuesday, the leading network of entrepreneurs. Julie is a World Economic Forum Global Leader for Tomorrow, an Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year and a BBC ‘Dragon’.

The day will be chaired by Real Business magazine editor and business guru Matthew Rock.

Programme:
Patents, Trademarks, Copyright – What IP strategy should you adopt? – Robert Pocknell, Keystone Law

IP support services offered without charge by the British Library – British Library

IP support services offered by the Intellectual Property Office (IPO) – IPO

From invention to commercial success; a case study – Jim Shaikh inventor of the award-winning Yoomi bottle

Lunch
Selling IP to big business – Michael Addison, Proctor & Gamble

IP and investment – Julie Meyer, Ariadne Capital and BBC ‘Dragon’

Panel discussion, chaired by Real Business Editor, Matthew Rock

15 September 2010

Our new free Inventing guide is out

As part of our Inventing the 21st Century Exhibition we have produced a free Inventing pdf guide which is now available on our website.

The guide summarises the key stages of taking an invention to market, and contains a handpicked list of websites, organisations and resources that will help you find what you need to know, and fast.

My colleagues have gone to a lot of trouble to find useful sources as well as explain some aspects of Intellectual Property (IP) in plain English (which is easier said than done).

Is your invention original?
It is important to search to see if anyone has already published or used a similar invention to your own, as this may mean that you cannot protect it. You can conduct a quick search yourself using free websites. However, we recommend that you gain advice from an expert to help you with your search and consult a patent attorney to advise if your invention is patentable. It takes 18 months for a new patent publication to be published so occasional checking on recently published patent specifications is also a good idea.

It also makes mention of my current favourite type of IP – Trade Secrets, as exemplified by the Coca-Cola formula.

Trade secrets and confidentiality agreements
Trade secrets and confidentiality are not covered by standard intellectual property law but can be useful for things which are not easy to formally protect, such as internal business procedures, recipes for food and business contacts. They last for ever if you manage to stop them leaking, so keeping a manufacturing process secret can give you a longer-lasting monopoly than a patent.

You automatically have a right to sue somebody for breaching confidence if: the information is not already common knowledge; it was disclosed to the other person in conditions that implied that they should keep it confidential; and you have suffered, or are likely to suffer, actual damage because of the disclosure. Having a formal non-disclosure or confidentiality agreement is often a safer option.

We also produce a general business advice pdf guide we call Business Essentials.

14 September 2010

Inventing the 21st Century Exhibition Evening

Last Wednesday night was the formal opening of our Inventing 21st Century exhibition by BIS Minister Mark Prisk. He talked about the British Library and the Business & IP Centre in glowing terms which was nice.

During the evening I chatted to a range of inventors and business support advisers, but my most memorable conversation was with a man in a K-2 Wheelchair featured in the exhibition. He explained how using it had changed his life for the better. It was inspiring to see how an invention can make such an impact on the lives of people.

The BBC has put together a slide show of the exhibits featured in the exhibition.

On Saturday morning, Steve Van Dulken the curator of the exhibition was interviewed on BBC Breakfast News with the inventor of a double headed broom.

Steve has also written a book Inventing the 21st Century to coincide with the exhibition.

14 September 2010

Five lessons in customer service from John Lewis

The John Lewis Partnership is a truly great British institution and is famous for its’ excellent customer service and good value (‘never knowingly undersold’).

As a regular customer at their Oxford Street store for many years (even including hosting my wedding list way back when I was young), I can personally confirm the high level of customer service they deliver.

Already this year, it has won the Which? Best Online Retailer 2010 and been voted Britain’s Favourite Retailer 2010.

Our partner Smarta.com has written an excellent article which explains their approach and gives tips for the rest of us to follow.

1. Make staff care about customer service

None of the 70,000 people who work at John Lewis is an employee – they’re all ‘partners‘, who jointly own the business. (It’s officially called the John Lewis Partnership.) They get a profit share based on how much profit is generated by the business as a whole, so they all feel really involved and really incentivised.

This encourages them to give dazzling service because they feel such a sense of ownership for the business. The documentary had no shortage of beaming employees extolling John Lewis’s virtues and radiating pride. The partnership scheme makes them feel valued, which makes them happy. And happy staff equal good staff. As executive chairman Charlie Mayfield puts it: “We’re based on the notion that if we treat our partners well, it will lead to good customer service.” Hear, hear.

Follow John Lewis’s example by: giving your staff shares or tying bonuses to the achievement of the whole business to make them proud of where they work, and happy to work hard for it.

2. Teach protocol – but empower staff to make decisions themselves

New members of staff at John Lewis are sent on mass customer service training days before their first day. After that, there’s ongoing training for employees to make sure everyone’s giving the same brilliant service. Want the short-cut to all that insight? Mark the words of the chirpy new recruit trainer who sums up John’s six founding principles of customer service thus: “Be honest; give respect; recognise others; show enterprise; work together; achieve more.”

The ‘showing enterprise’ point is interesting, because it’s not all about playing by the rule book. Partners are encouraged to make customer service decisions themselves on-the-spot. This means that that most despicable of retail irks – having to wait for ages while the person you’ve complained to fetches their manager – is neatly avoided.

Allowing employees to think for themselves also gives them a sense of responsibility – which, as a rule of thumb, they tend to want to live up to.

Follow John Lewis’s example by: teaching staff how to deal with queries and complaints, then stepping back and letting them make decisions for themselves wherever possible. Also, invest in proper training for your people and don’t be shy about sharing your vision and expectations.

3. Make sure front-line staff feedback on what customers want

Victoria Simpson, development manager for customer service at John Lewis, recommends talking to customer-facing staff regularly and getting them involved in improving the way things are done. “They have insights no one else can form.” Partners ask customers what they want and what they think, and record results. Then, they act on it. “It’s tempting to feel that once the information has been gathered, the job is done,” Simpson says. “But your processes and culture need to be altered as a result.”

Follow John Lewis’s example by: getting customer-facing staff to find out what customers are feeling, then using results to improve your service.

4. Be exceptional

Every now and then, some rare occurrence happens that lets a business take one of two paths: be ordinary, or be extraordinary. When a deluge of snow blanketed the country in December 2009, a certain John Lewis in Buckinghamshire realised that closing its doors as normal and sending customers into the blizzard would be callous. Instead, it decided to host an impromptu mass sleepover. It made up its beds and let more than 100 people stay the night, laying on food for everyone and opening up toys for the kids to play with.

Now, opportunities like this don’t come along all the time. But because of lesson number two, the John Lewis partners could decide for themselves to make the most of happenstance. And they got a good PR kick out of it too (check out this video from the BBC) – not to mention a lot of happy customers to spread the word in their community.

That’s not to say you can’t be exceptional day-to-day. The expertise of John Lewis’s in-store staff is one of the business’ strongest selling points. “If you don’t know your stuff,” one partner confides in the documentary, “the customers can see straight through it.” These partners are the walking talking encyclopaedias of their niches – and that fosters a sense of authority and trustworthiness that customers can’t resist.

Follow John Lewis’s example by: making sure your team know your products inside-out and embracing every opportunity you can to bend over backwards for customers.

5. Maintain customer service levels online

Selling online isn’t an excuse to let standards slip. Quite the opposite. It’s much more difficult to retain any of the personal touch of offline service, so you need to work even harder to make sure online customers still feel listened to.

John Lewis has an impressive and user-friendly website, sure. But more importantly, it makes sure its customers can contact a real person as soon as they want to. It offers phone numbers and the names and addresses of its customer service manager and head of online selling.

It also works hard to make sure online customers don’t feel short-changed. “The crucial part of service online is the last mile,” MD Andy Street explains in the documentary. “We have to bring the service into online.” He does this by making delivery options perfectly tailored to customers’ wants and by making sure the standards of expertise are carried through onto the website. So the site has loads of handy podcasts and advice guides.

Follow John Lewis’s example by: making sure that when customers shop online they feel they have a real person on-hand to help if needed, and that your brand values are carried over onto your website

1 September 2010

Our exhibition: Inventing the 21st century

From next Monday our new exhibition Inventing the 21st century, opens here at the British Library in our Folio Society Gallery, and runs until 28 November 2010.

It is a celebration of wonderful British ingenuity, and contains a wide range of inventions from sport to tackling climate change to the weekly nightmare of changing your duvet cover. It also includes President Obama’s favourite dog bowl (as seen – and rejected – on Dragons Den), and Dyson’s revolutionary bladeless fan.

My colleague Steve van Dulken is the curator of the exhibition and has already covered several of the inventions on show in his excellent Patent Search blog.

We are also running an Ingenious Britons evening event, where you will be able to hear from and put questions to some of the inventors.

In conjunction with the exhibition we also have an Invent it! campaign. We want to inspire the next generation of ingenious Britons to develop products to make your lives easier, from a mug of tea that never goes cold, to a smart phone battery that can last all week. Personally, I would like to have a stretchy keyboard for my Blackberry, as I can touch type, but my clunking fingers are far too big for the standard BB keys.

What would you like to see an invention for? Have your say on our Facebook fan page and Twitter using the hashtag #bipcinvent

We’ll be announcing the top ten ideas during Global Entrepreneurship Week (15 – 19 November).

14 August 2010

The oldest private library in Scotland

While on holiday staying with friends in Doune in Stirling in southern Scotland we popped over to Dunblane and paid a flying visit to Leighton Library.

According to the sign outside, it is the oldest private library in Scotland. It dates from 1687, and was built for the 1,400 book collection of Robert Leighton, the Bishop of Dunblane from 1661 to 1670. The cost of the building was £162 and the Bishop left another £100 to help build on the original collection of mainly religious texts.

The number of books grew to 4,500, and cover a wide range of topics printed from 1504-1840. Apparently the Bishop could read several languages, although at least 80 have been identified in the collection so I’m not sure who would have read those.

They have quite a few first editions dating from those periods, including The Lady of the Lake by Walter Scott. However, in many cases they only managed to get hold of second editions as they were often too slow coming up with payment to get hold of significant new publication before they had sold out their print run. So for instance they have a second edition of Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations.

We asked to have a look at Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language. Although not the first dictionary, this was certainly the most influential from the 1700’s. The library has a second edition from 1756, and it was wonderful to be able to look through the pages of such a significant publication.

We were very fortunate to have two librarians present to talk about the collection. One turned out to be the founder of the business library at Strathclyde University and the other had employed my old friend John Coll at the National Library of Scotland from the days when they had a science library.

We were made to sit on the original ‘turkie red lether’ chairs bought for the library in 1688, and still going strong today, and told lots of interesting stories about the collection and Johnson’s dictionary. I hadn’t heard about Johnson’s somewhat dubious definition for Oats before:
‘a grain, which in England is generally given to horses, but in Scotland supports the people.’
We have an image of the definition on our education pages.

The library is open to the general public from the beginning of May until the end of September as follows:

2011 – Robert Leighton was born in 1611 with the consequence that 2011 will represent the 400th anniversary of his birth. A number of events are planned to mark that occasion.

9 August 2010

Be Your Own Brand

I’ve just finished watching a short BBC documentary following Richard Reed of Innocent drinks company (On The Road With… – 4. An Entrepreneur). You might recognise him as one of our speakers at our recent The secret ingredient event. And, in fact the documentary ends with some clips of Richard at the evening.

Watching Richard reminded me how many of the most successful entrepreneurs are their own brand. I suppose Richard Branson and Virgin would be the most extreme version of this.

So it is timely that our partner Rasheed Ogunlaru will be running a workshop on this very topic here in September.

Be Your Own Brand: A unique one-day course to take you and your business to the next level.

Are you an entrepreneur, sole trader or small business? Is marketing, promotional and PR support beyond your budget at the moment? If so, then you must become your own brand. Leading life/business coach, PR and media specialist, Rasheed Ogunlaru, shares insights into raising awareness of your business, promoting yourself, broadening your networks and boosting your business – and your success.

He is joined by solicitor-turned-business advisor, Helen Parkins. Helen will show you how to develop powerful partnerships and when you’ll need to introduce the right legal agreements and abide by current rules and regulations to fast-track your success and avoid the pitfalls.

Benefits of attending and areas covered:

Develop a powerful sense of your brand and values
Communicate your message clearly and effectively
Be seen as a specialist in your field
Precise marketing: approaching the right customers directly
Build your business through contacts, partnership, joint initiatives
Identify simple ways of increasing your impact and profitability
Promote yourself as an expert in your industry or locality and in the media

Cost: £60 (lunch not included – but available in the library’s cafe/ restaurant)

How to Book: email rasheed@rasaru.com to book your place. When booking please include:

10.am-4.15pm Tue 21 Sept

10.am-4.15pm Thurs 25 Nov

30 July 2010

Judging the 2010 PRECIOUS Awards

I am greatly honoured to have been asked to be a judge for the 2010 PRECIOUS Awards, which celebrate the achievements of inspirational entrepreneurial women of colour who are running businesses in the UK.

The Awards evening will take place on Monday 8 November here at The British Library with Rasheed Ogunlaru presenting.

It only costs £1.00 to enter for one of the awards below, using either the Main Entry Form or the Leadership Form:

Start-Up Business of the Year:
Are you a business woman who has just started out? Do you want the business world to know how well you are doing? Then this category is for you! Nominees in this category can be from any business sector and must have been in business at least six months*.

Social Enterprise Business of the Year:
Sponsored by The Social Enterprise Coalition
Do you run a business that’s based on sound ethical principles? Are you a community interest or social enterprise company that gives back to the community? This is your chance to shine. Nominees must have been trading for at least 12 months*.

Service Business of the Year:
Is your business in the service sector. Do you run a shop or mobile business? Nominees in this category can be from any business sector. They must have been in business for more than 12 months*.

Creative Business of the Year:
Do you run a cultural and/or creative business? Is it based in an industry such as PR, design, fashion, music, advertising, marketing, or film? If you have been trading for at least 12 months then enter now*.

Online Business of the Year:
Are you committed to the online business model? Have you built an online brand you want to shout about? Is 55% of your turnover gained from online transactions? Yes? Then you could become the PRECIOUS Online business of 2010. you must have been in business for more than 12 months*.

Inspiring Leader within the Workplace:
Are you, or do you know someone working within a business or organisation who has taken on an entrepreneurial role within the company? Do their commitment and actions influence those within and extend beyond their workplace? Get recognition and nominate now.

Young Entrepreneur of The Year:
We’re looking for a PRECIOUS star of the future! If you are running a business and aged under 26 then this award is for you. It’s a special category designed to help find the best young business woman who is just starting out on her entrepreneurial journey. To enter this category you need to have been trading for at least six months *.

The Precious Entrepreneur of the Year:
This award awarded by the judges, recognises the most passionate and dedicated woman business owner who the judges feel has overcome significant challenges to achieve outstanding business success.