Rachel's Reflections on the week past - This week I consider three examples of how a business has lost it's connection with it's

Why it is important to take a break when you are self-employed

This is me 6 months ago... It’s my first go at a co-working morning. I don’t get it. I don’t work with these other people. What business is it of theirs what I do? Is that guy looking at me? How dare he listen to me on the phone. I bet he can see my screen too. I bet he thinks I should be doing this differently. And what if he sees something he shouldn’t? I’m not liking this. I’m going to make an excuse and get out of here. “Sorry everyone, just had a text from school, I’ve g

Outsourcing has many a negative connotation but its a great means of growth for small business and it is more and more available to all.

It’s now the time where we make our new year resolutions and look forward to the next 12 months. We look forward to what we are going to do and how we are going to do it. We must be positive and look forward. Move on. Put the past behind us. Live in the future. No regrets. Don’t look back……. I can’t think of any more clichés. Hang on a minute. Why shouldn’t we look back? It always seems that looking back on the past is a negative. I don’t understand why. What we do in the fut

Having given you my top Best Bit of Self Employment, it's time for one of the Worst Bits. The BIG BOYS!!!! Yep, you know it, the big companies and names that know to pray on the new, naive and happy to talk to anyone who notices them because they haven't seen it coming yet. For me there have been a couple of particularly bad experiences and I will tell you about them to save you the same pain. Yell - Oh my goodness, possibly the worst of my decisions to date. They fooled me i

Working for myself has been a learning curve, a big one and there have been many things already that I have picked up on or learnt. There are so many different elements to running your own business some of them brilliant and some of them really difficult and challenging. I thought I would start two streams of blog, The Best Bits and The Worst Bits as I see them. I know these will resonate with others but it might also offer those thinking about starting out on their own route

This week I've been fortunate enough to attend two events in two different settings. They were both suggesting to businesses a means to survive Brexit. I have felt reassured by these speakers that there is another way to act and feel. We don't have to follow the panic, shock and horror that has been the norm for the last two weeks. Having seen people act with disdain to other Europeans in unforgivable ways, I needed this other view. I am sure a lot of others do too. So I thou

Two major events have occurred in the last couple of weeks (actually I am sure there are many more but the media are forgetting to tell us about those), Brexit and England out of the Euros, much of a much-ness some might say but they seem, in my mind, to have some things in common which also relate to running businesses. Firstly complacency, this country seems to live by it at times and I think our government and the English football team have shown it in full effect. David C

Looking back to my GCSE days, I remember being told that I should not play music when I was studying, especially not loud music. I wasn't asked, it was a fact. I would not be able to concentrate. However, this week, for some reason I started to play some music whilst I was plugging away on a creative piece of work and it really helped me to keep my focus, in fact, I sort of disappeared into the project and the music and worked more quickly and efficiently. It happened that I