Every year Insider profiles 42 entrepreneurs under the age of 42 to unearth the business leaders of tomorrow. Why 42? Because we want represents individuals who are ten years younger than the average age of people on Insider's Rich and Power Lists.
Never has it been truer that cash is king. Most business failures happen not because of failings by personnel or bad advice, but because of poor cash-flow management.
For smaller businesses needing a short-term fix, or for start-ups setting up as experienced staff leave larger organisations, serviced offices can be a godsend.
Office take-up figures for the year have been disappointingly low, even in a market that didn’t expect to have a great year. The agents are working the phones and pounding the pavements, but with finance in short supply occupiers are loathe to commit.
The use of pre-pack administrations – when a buyer is lined up for a struggling business before it goes into administration or liquidation – is becoming popular. If a viable business is carrying debt it can no longer service, and people’s jobs are on the line, it may be appropriate to do a pre-pack once all other options have been exhausted.
In the second of Insider’s international maps, looking at the distribution of the advisory and funding community in overseas jurisdictions, North America comes under the spotlight. While many companies are looking to the east for opportunities, the US still accounts for a large percentage of UK exports.
The strength and diversity of the North West manufacturing sector contributes £18.9bn GVA to the region’s wealth and is a boon in balancing the regional economy through the toughest conditions for decades.
In July 2009 Courier Logistics in Manchester said it had delivered record sales after marketing its business online. Director Paul Johnson says: “I’d tell anyone in business, whatever your business is, if you haven’t heard of search engine optimisation (SEO) to seriously look into it. For us the results have been fantastic.”
Although a sign of grim times, the announcement that local authorities across the region have been awarded cash pots to bolster employment by increasing public service jobs has to be welcomed.
In July a partnership set up to provide support for development in North Allerdale was the North West Market Town Awards, in recognition of a project that has put in place key community facilities.
The advent of cloud computing will take the IT world by storm, or maybe it already has. The growth of hosted software, when companies pay a fee to use programmes through the internet, is expected to stir up activity in the corporate finance market and change the way businesses set up IT systems.
