When we speak of gender equality, we like to think, in 2020, that we’ve come a long way from the patriarchal society of days gone by. Which is of course true, however, when it comes to business there are still battles to be won and barriers to break down.

Home learning? As governments worldwide announce school closures in response to the COVID-19 outbreak, it is important parents and teachers seek out and have access to fresh and pioneering new ways to keep young minds learning and stimulated in the months ahead.

There’s no shortage of fantastic startups in the UK but introducing their technologies and solutions into the public sector presents a challenge for both sides.

Cloud computing might be a relatively mature technology now, well-adopted by many types of SMEs, but changing your cloud strategy can still be daunting. Do the benefits of multi-cloud outweigh the costs? Is it worth the additional time spent managing multiple services, especially for a smaller business? I think that it is, and here’s why.

Jo White, Marketing Manager at customer relationship management software specialists Capsule, looks at the top sectors destined for startup success in 2020 and beyond. She explains how startups can leverage the latest technology to build lasting and meaningful personal relationships to deliver the excellence in customer experience needed to make it big.

At the start of a company’s life, building a business is all-consuming, especially for founders going it alone. For those with an entrepreneurial background, juggling the quest for investment, continuous product or service development and a huge amount of administration is taxing.

To remain competitive, every company across every industry is now compelled to rethink its established ways of doing business. Change is set to continue, the ride is only going to get faster and the differences more fundamental. The risks of not adapting are now outweighing the risks of staying the same.

Many companies collapse after expanding too quickly and spending more than the new business brought in. The sales figures can be high, but the profit may not be there. Or, an unexpectedly large order may put extra pressure on employees – if they deliver a positive experience, a business can be propelled into the next stage of growth.

If you are considering beginning a new startup business, you will not be happy to hear that 90% of start-ups fail; according to the Startup Genome Project. However, if you understand the reasons why new companies fail to become successes, you can avoid falling into those pitfalls.

The stigma attached to periods manifests in many ways and in the workplace, it can often prove quite a difficult obstacle to overcome. In 2018, there were 15.3 million women aged over 16 in employment, with the total female employment rate being 71.4% — the highest ever figure since 1971, when records began.

Many startups are born of a desire to fix a social or environmental issue that the founders believe has been poorly addressed. Many governments, councils and politicians believe the same, enacting policies to hopefully enable these solutions – either through public funding, tax breaks or regulatory requirements (to recycle or meet emissions targets, etc).

The road to developing, catalysing and scaling a sustainable energy business is an eventful, long and can be a frustrating one. I know because I am travelling on that journey right now. For me it started four and half years ago when I purchased a 322 hectare site in Cameroon with a vision to establish it as a production park for biofuels.

The third in our six part series of articles harnesses our Associate and Partner network and focusses on narrative and storytelling.  How you talk about yourself and your company is literally the front door key to everything else.

The issue of ‘why’ small businesses should be more environmentally-friendly is well-trodden ground – perhaps less so is ‘how’. There are, of course, a number of practical things that businesses can do to go greener. Here are my top tips for tackling the climate issue head on:

The shortlist for the Business Book Awards 2020 has just been announced and we’ve cherry picked the titles that should be on every entrepreneur’s bookshelf. Here are the top six picks…

Mental health is a topical concern. It’s also sensitive, delicate and for entrepreneurs specifically it can be sore, often kept secret. At the end of 2019, while running my men’s mental health magazine MAN_AGE, I found I work the equivalent of four, maybe five jobs. 

Virtually every startup thinks of itself as innovative, but are they really? Every day I help companies claim cash for innovative activities through the R&D tax credit scheme. Most of these companies are somewhat innovative, however, to be truly innovative is really tough. In this column, I want to explore what innovation means and how you might apply it to your business.

Some questions in life are more fundamental than others and some are more specific or technical, and so it is in the world of early stage businesses. But for the person asking the question, each carries the same weight, and each is of the same importance because at the time of asking it is that point that is not understood. 

I have always believed in the power of accelerators and, as a founder of my own startup, I experienced how beneficial they can be.

For anyone starting a business there is that delicious and intoxicating mixture of excitement tinged with fear. That is partly the fear of the unknown but it is also very much the fear of failure.