Fashion Enter Workshops: Start up Business Advice

I benefited enormously from the feedback and questions and answers during the session so thanks to those who look part. The fact these notes are circulated after the event means I have a better idea about some of the things you want to know about—so I hope they are helpful. They might be a bit wordy, but wherever possible we have high-lighted key points to help you. Any more feedback you can send, so we can keep improving these, would be gratefully received. 

Most of the time before the workshop involved me trying to work out what I think you might like to know about based on my experience of advising many start-up companies over many years. As I like to think I am very commercially minded lawyer I knew I needed to strike a balance between legal niceties and business practicalities. I guessed one place to start, was to say that there has never been a more popular time for people to form a new business. I do a lot of writing and lecturing on all sorts of things relating to business law in its widest sense and have a big hang up with over-regulation and red tape. I am convinced that companies could operate much more effectively if layers of rules and regulations were removed, but despite all the intentions by so many people it looks as if we are stuck with what we have so we better get on with it.

Despite a lot of debate about it we can I think say that setting up a new business in England (and the rest of the UK) is as simple (if not simpler) as in every other major industrialised country.

• There are 4.5 million small businesses in the UK (so those up to 50 employees);
• SMEs (so those up to 249 employees) account for 99 per cent of all enterprise in the Uk, 58.8 per cent of private sector employment and 48.8 per cent of private sector turnover;
• SMEs employed an estimated 13.8 million people and had an estimated combined annual turnover of £1,500 billion.

I thought we might go through some of the key issues which you should think about when you are setting up a new business venture.

So maybe first we need to identify what we mean by sitting up a business. Why? Because getting it wrong could have effects not only on the business itself but on you as owners/managers/directors. There are really five main choices but I want to concentrate on just two…

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