Chrissie Hynde
: Don't Get Me Wrong: I Won't Stand For Cruelty to Geese
Ed Miliband
: A Distant and Distracted Cameron Cannot Tackle Tax Avoidance
Charles Moore
: Margaret Thatcher's First Visit to Washington of the Reagan Presidency
Natalie Bennett
: Jobs You Can Build a Life On: The British Economy Isn't Delivering
Seth Freedman
: We Don't Need No Regulation
I think as a young person starting their first job, a smaller company is a great setting to work within because you really feel like part of the team. From my interview with the CEO to my inclusion in day to day operations, I have felt like a valued member of the Thomsons team.
SMEs are often the businesses struggling the most with recruitment as they don't have the mass brand appeal of the big players and also don't have the big budgets to throw at recruitment advertising campaigns.
Well, yes. Is the short answer! You've probably heard that the government is now bringing in compulsory pensions for all employees. But just from the kinds of queries I am now getting since auto-enrolment media coverage started, it is clear that many SMEs aren't sure what their current obligations are, nevermind what the new ones will be.
If you ask any small business to list the issues that most affect its daily activity, you would get very short odds on at least part of the answer being access to finance. Over the last five years, banks have been vilified both for lending too frivolously and too modestly - quite an achievement, even for a banker.
It can't have passed you by that this summer is set to be a bumper one for the UK. Having experienced the highs of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee, and the lows of Euro 2012, the Olympics is now just around the corner.
To SME or not to SME, that is the question. Well, in the case of the Brighton Fuse, that is the questionnaire. This week the BF team are launching an online survey to figure out why Brighton works as a creative, digital and IT (CDIT) cluster, how the small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) might grow and prosper, and in particular how the universities fit into that growth story.
The selling of interest rate swaps to Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs), by the High Street banks, looks set to engulf those institutions just as they seem set to deal with the final froes of the PPI mis-selling pay outs.
Everybody I speak to in the IT industry agrees that the lack of job-focused IT skills in UK school leavers and graduates is causing recruitment problems in the technology sector at a time when we wrestle with unemployment across the country.
In competitive marketplaces the web, related social media and even mobile channels can be unforgiving. The window of opportunity to entice and maintain interest is limited if the quite straightforward approaches aren't adopted. Fail here, and the task of 'turning the frown upside down' could become an impossible mission.
The drive to recruit 5000 business mentors, specifically for women, is just the sort of activity that will be effective on the ground: both inspiring and practical. As a nation, we need totally new ways of thinking and doing business so that we not only survive these challenging times but find growth.
Then economies of scale clearly dictate that SMEs wouldn't be bidding for contracts worth £1.4billion, those figures are only for the big firms. But big firms need revenue or they will shrink to smaller entities, so they have to make a decision 'do we just land one big fish or lots of little ones?'
