Here at in-business.org.uk we would like to wish all of our readers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy and Prosperous New Year.

If you are looking for some ideas on New Year’s Resolutions then these might help…

1. If you have an idea for a new business and if till now you have been putting it off…make a resolution to commit to taking your business idea forward in 2010! Read about How to Start a Small Business.

2. If you are bad at doing your filing (Like me) then how about promising to keep up-to-date with your filing in 2010.

3. If you have been thinking about ‘Writting a Business Plan‘ and a cash flow forecast for your existing business and been putting this off…stop putting it off and get to it! Make 2010 the best year ever for your business…write a business plan and set your business in the right direction – Don’t fail to implement!

4. If you are too busy doing things in your business and doing what I consider ‘Working In’ your business…promise to start delegating in 2010 and start ‘Working On’ your business in 2010. Learn how to delegate task in your business!

5. If you are not sure about where your customers are coming from and you do not measure your advertising costs versus your new client inflows…consider s New Year’s resolution of starting to ‘Measure and Manage’ your business. Also consider starting a ‘Marketing Calendar’. Develop your business Key Performance Indicators or KPIs.

Whatever your New Year’s resolution for 2010 and whatever you do in your business

Gold broke the $1,000 per ounce this week to close up 1% on the week at $1,006 per ounce.

Also, a very good week for all world stock markets which all moved in a positive direction and most notably the UK’s FTSE250 moving up by over 5% on the week.

On the currency market the US Dollar has strengthened against the major world currencies this week, whilst Sterling has dropped back.

End of the week saw:

You may be saying – but I do involve my employees in my business…but do you?

Of course your employees to do the work of the business and the employees, with the right direction, make any business great as it expands, but there are not many business owners that involve their employees in helping with important decisions.

I would suggest that you ask them their opinion on various expansion ideas or where you are looking at introducing new products or services get their input on this.

Also, ask them how to improve on customer service, especially those employees that are on the front line, as it were…as these are the ones that are dealing with the customers directly and are therefore likely to give you some of the best feedback.

Never be scared of getting the opinions of your employees and remember that most people work better with their own ideas than on ideas that have been forced upon them from a-high!

A good way of doing this is to have regular group meetings with your employees…if you are a small business then there is no reason why this could not involve all employees of the business, but you may have to do this after hours otherwise there will be no one to run the business whilst you are all in a meeting. I would suggest putting on some drinks and eats in the meeting and make it fun and enjoyable so that they all enjoy the experience…thereby you will get the best out of them.

If your business is a larger company with too many employees to meet in one sitting, consider breaking this up into smaller meetings and perhaps get someone to volunteer from each group meeting to come forward to meet together to discuss their individual ideas.

The benefit of this system is not only will it produce great ideas to take your business forward, but it will also help to make it more independent of you the business owner.

If you put yourself in the position of a customer for a moment – this will help you to recognise a good method of encouraging your own business customers to purchase from, especially for new customers for their first time!

You must have a favourite shop where you buy your clothes from in the high street or even on the Internet these days…and I would take a bet that one of your reasons for buying from this company, aside from the quality of the product etc. is for their returns policy.

This is their guarantee to you that if you are not totally satisfied with the item supplied, then you may return the item to the store. A good example of a company that does this kind of returns policy very well is Ikea, as they have a returns policy of 90-days, which is much higher than most and look at how successful this company is.

A guarantee works in the same way as this and can be as bold to say that…”if you are not totally satisfied with our product or service then you will not pay a single penny!” You might cringe at the thought of offering such a bold guarantee, but potential customers will certainly think long and hard about such a bold statement…they will think that you, as a company, must be so confident about your service or about your products to provide such a confident statement.

If your business does not already have some kind of guarantee then you should definitely consider introducing such a scheme…examples of guarantees:

- If you do not like our XYZ product or if you change your mind, bring it back in new condition and we will give you a full refund…no questions asked.

- If I do not show up within half an hour of our agreed meeting time you will not have to pay.

- If your delivery is not made on the next day we will pay you the price of your goods ordered plus £100.

I am sure that you will be able to make some of these up for yourself…the more outrageous the guarantee the more likely you will beat what the competition is doing and therefore stand out from the crowd!

P.s. If you work on the premise that the majority of people are honest your guarantee policy will only serve your business in a positive way thereby attracting customers andmore business, rather than to make you a loss…of course this is subject to your company delivering  a quality product and on time.

Most notable this week is the plunge in oil prices again with the price per barrel falling by 7.7% on the week to close at below $70 a barrel again.

The other commodity we report on is gold, which has risen sharply again this week closing at just below $1,000 an ounce. However, the world stock markets saw a fall on the week, with the exception of the Chinese Hang Seng which did the opposite as usual and gained by 1.1%.

End of the week saw:

If you have a pension scheme or if you own shares then the likelihood is that you are making money from the porn industry!

I have just watched a program on BBC 2 about the porn industry and who makes money from it…it was interesting to note that this was not just the porn film makers. In addition to the makers of porn you have the hotel chains that sell porn in their bedrooms; the phone companies like Vodafone that make money from porn on mobiles; companies like Virgin and B Sky B make money from showing adult films on their channels; there are the credit card companies that take their cut from the sales or porn, which are owned by the banks…and so on.

It depends on your view of porn and whether this bothers you or not, but I would bet that most people do not realise this and there are many that would probably try to change this if they did know!

There was a financial expert on the show who was asked what percentage of the UK stock market would be involved in porn to some extent or not and this was just 5%, so therefore not a huge issue for those that want to avoid this type of investment.

At the end of the day no matter whether we like it or not sex sells and porn is going to be with us forever and makes billions of dollars every year!

To answer the question “Does my business need a blog?” then you need to look at how it can benefit you before deciding on whether you need one or not.

These days many businesses are adding a blog to their website, as they firstly acknowledge that it is a good traffic generation tool and it helps to tell your audience that you know what you are talking about…let me explain…

Every time you post a page on the internet you give yourself another opportunity of getting that page found on the internet by potential customers. It is worth researching key search terms for your business and your business products and services. Once you have researched this by using SEO tools like Wordtracker FREE keyword suggestion tool you can use these key words to create posts that will be searched for on the Internet and then find your site.

Once you have your “Key Phrases” which include your “Key Words” you can then start to build web pages based around these words. Using a blog for this purpose you can write articles based upon your key words, which will not only be found if they have been optimised correctly, but will also tell your customers more about that particular service.

In your article on the blog the title should include your “Key Phrase” and “Key Words” and then you should go on to include the same phrases within the article, some of which should be boldened and at least one of them linking off to your main website. This will help the search engines to index your page and thereby find you for the terms you desire.

If you do decide to have a blog associated with your business website then I suggest you use good blogging software like WordPress, which is what has been used to run this blog – and what is great is the software is FREE!

Once you decide to have a blog you must make sure that you keep the content up-to-date and you must make sure that you write articles on a regular basis – I would suggest at a very minimum of one per month, which would mean 12-articles per year, but even better one per week. You can get your employees to help with article ideas and topics and get them to help with writing them, so that you spread the load.

A fall on the world stock markets across the board happened this week and one that stands out above the rest is the French CAC40 which dropped by 14% this week – this could lead to a number of take-over bids from overseas, subject to the usual French preventative rules.

The crude oil price fell this week by a futher 9% have lost 5.5% last week to close at under $60 per barrel again. Gold has also continued to fall this week closing at a new low of $913.
End of the week saw:

If you are considering setting up in business and you are not sure what to do then how about a list of businesses you could begin – so here is a list of small business ideas:

- An online business selling products using a drop-shipping company – like umbrellas or women’s shoes or perhaps perfumes.
- Become a plumber – even during a slow-down plumbers seem to be in demand and can earn significant sums.
- Set up take away business selling pizzas or burgers – in a slow down these types of business always prosper, as people tend not to go to restaurants as much, but will still get a take away with a bottle of wine. You do have the option of setting up a franchise with this line of business, but you have to consider the fact that a per cent of your turnover will be taken by the franchisor.
- Set up a gym, which is where Duncan Bannatyne made a large percentage of his fortunes – remember a good tip of his, which is to make sure your location has a 360 degree population around the site. In other words if you were to choose a location on the coast you have just limited your customers numbers in direct driving distance from your gym, as there will only be houses in a 180 degree arc on one side of your site.
- A cake making business is something you could start up from your kitchen and begin by supplying to weddings and local shops.
- A cleaning business cleaning homes and/or businesses – if done correctly and once you begin employing people you can make a lot of money doing this.
- A gardening and landscape gardening business is a business which is always in demand.
- A handyman come maintenance type of business.
- Building and maintenance business.
- Computer maintenance and hire company and in particular computer network support, as this is always in demand.
- Wedding services business, including photographer and a wedding planner – most women are very good a planning weddings and most will have done so in their life, so why not do this for others.
- An ironing service.

Think about what you are good at or what you have trained to do as there will be business opportunities in whatever field you are in. When you are thinking about your business idea it is always worth considering the “expandability” of your idea.

So if you choose a cleaning business, then there is nothing wrong in starting out doing the initial work yourself, but ads things expand you can then begin to employ others to do the cleaning work so that you can begin to sit back and manage the business – this way your business will become an asset to sell in the future – the less you are involved in the day-to-day running of the business and so long as it is profitable, then the more it will be worth to others to buy.

This week we saw the Nationwide bank launch a 125% mortgage which will hopefully be the beginning of the end of a time of limited borrowing during times of credit crunch lending!

The Nationwide’s new loan facility is to help existing customers who want to move, but can’t because they are in negative equity. The way this new lending works is that the customer will be able to borrow up to 95% of the value of their new home, so they will need to have a 5% deposit.

Subject to fulfilling certain conditions, customers will then be able to add the negative equity from the house they are selling to the new mortgage, so long as this amount of extra lending does not exceed 25% of the new homes value.

For example:

A customer has an existing house worth £175,000 with a mortgage of £250,000, which means they are in negative equity by £75,000.

They want to buy a new house that is worth £275,000, on which the Nationwide would potentially lend £261,250 (which represents 95% of the value) – they will need a deposit of £13,750. This extra lending is subject to a few conditions and their new “stress test”. This new stress test will ensure that customers are still able to afford the mortgage repayments if interest rates have risen to 9% or 10% once the fixed-rate element of the loan has expired.

The maximum extra they could borrow in this case would be 25 per cent of £275,000, which is £68,750. So in this example they would not be able to borrow the whole of the equity short-fall of £75,000 and would therefore need to put a further £6,250 into the deal.

Nationwide customers will be offered a three-year fixed rate mortgage at 6.73 per cent or a five-year one at 7.48 per cent on the 95 per cent portion of the mortgage. Interest charged on the negative equity element of the borrowing rises to 7.23 per cent for three-year fixed and 7.98 per cent for five-year fixed.

These rates are quite high in the present market so customers will obviously be quite desperate to move up if they are willing to pay these high fixed rate mortgages!