Britain - a nation of small firms, most with no employees!

News arrived this morning from The Small Business Service (SBS) an executive agency of the Department of Trade and Industry, announcing Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) Statistics for the UK 2005. The press release can be found at, Small Business Service web site What the figures confirm is that in numeric terms 99.3% of all the UK’s 4.3 million business enterprises are officially classified as small – that is they employ less than 49 people. Of these, 3.2 million some 72.8% have no employees at all! These are interesting statistics where nearly three quarters of all UK businesses are one-man operations. In theory, plenty of scope to grow small businesses into medium size enterprises, a role where marketing can play a crucial role. The challenge is identifying those businesses that actually want to grow and take on employees with all the legislative implications that goes with it. This is an interesting challenge - the companies that could really benefit from marketing expertise are the least able to invest. We have developed means for working with clients that are highly affordable and where the impact of marketing can be quickly assessed in terms of orders received.