Tag: business

Want to start a business in Wirral? Why not start right here, right now?

We’re coming out of recession. The banks aren’t lending. Its nearly winter. There’s a million and one reasons why there’s never a right time to start up a business. And a million and one why it’s the right time.

You get to shape your own future, rather than have it shaped for you by distant beaurocrats. You get to develop your own ideas, unhindered by the pressures and politics of more noisier colleagues who are always putting you down. You get to shape the culture of your workplace rather than being the unwitting object of other peoples cultural outdated cultural habits. You get to employ people, create jobs and make a difference to others around you.

Sure, none of this easy, and none of this makes for sleepless nights and a stress-lite existence. For a sleep-full and stress-empty life, you might be better retiring to the hills, writing your memoirs and feel comforted in what could have been, what would have been, and what should have been.

But if you have an idea which is itching to get out, which will contribute to your community, your society and the people around you, then now is absolutely the right time to set up your new business.

Aspire Trust is now offering business start up services for all Wirral residents (or those who want to set up a business in Wirral). We offer:

Advice and guidance on income generation and funding
Structured 1:1 support and group based programmes
Cross trading opportunities with other new businesses
National and International trading links
Customised programmes for your own business requirements.

We work across all business sectors – creative, digital, retail, manufacturing, you name it – our advisors are there to help.

The service is not free – but its absence of public funding means that you don’t waste your valuable business time filling in pointless forms and ticking boxes for the sheer hell of it!  It also means that you won’t be working with advisors who’s interests are more on hitting their funding targets than on supporting your business interests.

Your time is the most precious asset you have – and our work with you recognises that.

Just drop me an email at nick@aspire-trust.org if you require further information.

Lean back and glare: a waiting story in the supermarket ebb and flow

I was shopping as-per in the as-per multinational su-per market today and was confided in by one of the check out staff whilst I was waiting to rid myself of my unwanted cash in return for their highly desireable goods.

“I’m off in 8 so I sit back in my chair and glare at them hoping they’ll go away“. ‘Them’ of course being your average as per customer ie the likes of you and me.

I thanked her for her insight into the ways of the check out staff and made a mental note that next time I visited the as per su-per market, i would keep an eye out for staff who were due to come off their shifts, stack up the trolley with as much produce as possible, stagger over to them, laboriously unload all my shopping and then admit to forgetting my credit card.

This would be a sure fire way to disrupt the massive machine that is the as-per su-per market. This action could be coupled with plans for other shoppers to amble slowly the wrong way around the shops; breaking eggs in the wrong aisles, taking phone calls at the fish stall and ensuring that the smooth movements the market has planned for us the moment we enter their premises are disrupted at every conceivable opportunity.

Whilst this may not encourage modern capitalism to reconsider its ways, it may be a contributory factor to ensuring that the su-per market senior management oiks have to respond to the irrationality and unpredictability of human beings, even if it does mean their staff have to stay a bit longer and clean up the mess. There’s always more reasons to find ways to ensure every little helps with their overtime bills, I’m sure.

5 tips for everyone: how not to become part of the business world

Every now and then you have to take stock of what you’re part of and what is expected of you in this multi-demanding world we find ourselves in. Either every teenager is expected to want to go to university, or everyone over 50 is expected to don their dancing shoes, shake off the years and become lean, mean fighting machines, or every public sector worker is expected to turn into an eagle eyed entrepreneur and set up their own business, often on the flimsiest of pretexts.

This latter expectation is particularly worrying given the myths and legends which seem to populate public fantasies about what it’s like to work in the business world. So, here’s some advice on how not to become part of that world, should you wish to stay sane in your own personal world of education, employment or imagination.

1. Don’t think in terms of targets, key performance indicators, goals, strategies, visions, missions, or any thing else that has vaguely military overtones to it. Don’t even use these words. Ever.

2. Don’t dress to impress or invest. You can spend far too much time worrying about what you look like in other peoples eyes, particularly those who you imagine might have access to large wads of cash. They frequently don’t.

3. Don’t polish your shoes. Ever. Shiny shoes are a sign of mental anguish and a desire to please the craven. They promise the world and deliver the gutter.

4. Dowse the word ‘marketing’ with a large cup of petrol and throw a match at it. Stand well back. Try not to promote anything to anyone, ever.

5. Imagine your world shorn of logos, brands and tradmarks. Aim to live your life with the minimum of these commercial albatrosses around your neck.

6. Either trade in your passport for or take out as many as you possibly can. Refuse to identify with any one nation, one corporation or one brand of chocolate.

Go on, you know you want to.

Beyond Leadership: International Business Conference on export and international trade at Lancaster University, March 2013

The pressure on businesses to survive and thrive through developing their export capacity are growing weekly. Hardly a day goes by without some politician or business leader exhorting businesses to develop their international links and export capabilities. But authentic and inspiring knowledge, advice and guidance can be hard to find. All too frequently, businesses can be offered superficial solutions to complex, strategic problems.

Beyond Leadership aims to reverse this trend by offering business leaders and acclaimed business academics the space, time and opportunities to meet, converse and establish meaningful long term dialogue between each other. The conference will offer opportunities to re-think strategic approaches to export and international trade and establish vital new links between the higher education sector, businesses and international partners.

Beyond Leadership is for business professionals, academics and researchers who specialise in business and those who practise leadership especially in international trade and export contexts. It is suitable for both those businesses who are new to export and existing, well established exporters. The conference will enable you to make new business and academic connections, develop new knowledge about export, develop new approaches to strategic development and increase your capacity to grow your business both nationally and internationally.

Co-produced by the Aspire Trust and the Grove International Management School, this event is for practitioners, academics and researchers and those who practice leadership in any kind of organisational setting especially in overseas trade.

The event will take place at Lancaster University on 21 and 22 March 2013. For further details, and to book your place please contact us at nick@aspire-trust.org.

3 Principles of Artistic Partnership: Liberté, Egalité,Fraternité

There’s been an increase recently of large arts organisations who, in an effort to demonstrate their badge of social conscience, like to present themselves as ‘partners’ to smaller arts organisations. But the notion of what they mean by partnership varies wildly, even sometimes on a day to day basis within the same organisation too.

Whilst they might declare that they have noble intentions in supporting their local cultural ecology, in practice when artistic push turns into economic shove and the smaller partner starts punching above its ecological status, then the larger partner can start forgetting the basics of real partnership working such as:

1. Liberté. The partnership works best when both partners enter that partnership voluntarily and are not coerced into or into an arrangement that suits one partner better than the other.

2. Egalité. Respect language differences. Appreciate your way of knowing the world and acting upon it is not the only way of living the good life. Other partners might speak differently, use different metaphors and may not be hide-bound by your language – the value of your partnership is in appreciating those differences in language and not just railroading over them.

3. Fraternité. Realise that your organisational weight is not the be all and end-all. It’s not just your history that makes you a partner – you have to bring ongoing skills, knowledge and wisdom to this process not just a superior histori-cultural capital. A decent partnership isn’t a forced marriage where you bring your ugly self and explain it away with the large inheritance you’re bringing to justify your place at the table.

All partnerships need the benefit of joint wisdoms and a commitment to talking and respecting each other.  The partner who manages to ignore these guidelines is nothing more than a control freak who can’t tolerate the notion that perhaps some-one somewhere out there might just have something more important to say than the repetition of the tired old canon that many find themselves having to repeat to themselves year after year.

The benefits of the bus driver, epistemiologically speaking. Number 2 in an the series: Knowledge, traffic and arts based research.

The double decker bus driver has the resources of at least 11 on board CCTV cameras on their bus.

This gives them the benefit of knowing where he or she is going. They know too, pretty much, how they’re gonna get there, how long it will take and these days, with the added value of GPS, know what the conditions are going to be like ahead of them. They will also know that in large cities especially, the traffic lights will be rigged in their favour.  They may not know however why they’re going where they’re going – but that kind of existential question is also beyond pretty much every taxi driver too so they’re both in the same boat in that respect (NB boat – not taxi or bus).

The main significant advantage of the bus drivers knowledge however is the fact that should he or she wish, they have access to upto 56 other people’s knowledge about the reasons for their journeys. This would give them a superior knowledge of the traveller and their lived experiences: adding to the ongoing epistemiological crisis of the taxi driver who these days neither knows nor cares why they’re going somewhere, how much it costs or even how to get there.

Of course, the bus driver may not have the time or skill to elicit those knowledges from their passengers. This is where arts based research can play a major role in making the bus journey a much more enriching experience for everyone. They will make living the good life, an even more likely proposition.

More travel knowledge here.

It’s Conference Season! How to avoid the worst of conferences

Its that time of year again!  Time to pack our bags, brush up our papers, remember how to work powerpoint remotely and steel ourselves for mass produced sandwiches in ecologically friendly cardboard boxes.  Yes, the joys of the conference and all it entails.

i’m really looking forward to conferences that don’t build on their content, aren’t a mix of practical and theoretical, are technologically unreliable, are unrigorous, provide a platform for the wrong kind of speakers, aren’t chaired well, don’t offer chances for dialogue, have the same old same old people on the panels and  provide too many spaces for axe grinding: and particularly those educational conferences which have little in the way of artistry and preach the educational message in an utterly non-educational manner.  Conferences with a pay-bar on the opening night are also low on the list.

But hope springs eternal and i’m looking forward to a better experience of meeting old colleagues, making new friends and confering – the whole point of the conference experience of course.  As Mohammed Arif said at our first All Our Futures conference, I came to England alone; and leave the conference with new friends’. So here’s to new friends, new ideas, new challenges and with any luck, new solutions to feeding the conference frenzied masses.

If you’re at BERA at the Institute of Education, London next week, the Transformative Difference Conference at Liverpool Hope University the week after, the PASCO Conference in Belgrade next month or the ISBE (Institute of Small Business and Entrepreneurialship) Conference the month after, please feel free to come and strike up a conversation.  Who knows, we might have some ideas on what constitutes the best of conferences!