List of Audio and Video

Smarta’s excited too and our belief that we’ve entered a new, exciting time for business was our main reason for writing this book. Reject, ignore and banish any notion from the national press, politicians or even business lobby groups of doom and gloom, economic hardship and credit crunch. We’re not denying any of those things, we’re just not – like all the smartest business people right now – distracting ourselves with them either. The truth is, for the people starting exceptional businesses, the economy is irrelevant. Yes, we said it – and yes, we stand by it.

Make no mistake: this is a phenomenally exciting time to be starting or running a really smart business. If you’re thinking of starting a mediocre business we might be more cautious. But if you want success badly enough then you genuinely have never had so many opportunities to make that happen. And it’s never a bad time to start a great business.

The world has changed. The rules have changed – and we promise you, they’ve changed in your favour. Whatever the state of the economy and the national debt and whether or not we’ve got stealth taxes, deficits and cost-cutting coming out of our ears, business is open for trade like never before.

What do we mean when we say everything has changed? We mean everything. Again, forget the ‘business world’ for a moment – that’s rarely where the best businesses are dreamt up, after all.

Instead, focus on the world around you. In the past few years it’s changed immeasurably. Compared to ten or even five years ago, the way we work, play, communicate, consume, earn, spend, borrow, save and take in our news – these have all changed unrecognizably.

Every raw function of our everyday lives has been touched by the emergence, convergence and development of technology and the internet. These innovations have changed not just our functions but how we form opinions, express opinions, our expectations and our desires.

The hurtling pace of change shows no sign of slowing – and yet this is only the start. The internet has only been in most of our lives for 13 years or so. It’s barely a teenager with spots, for heaven’s sake. Imagine its potential when it’s fully grown up and graduated.

The smart businesses out there are already busy keeping up with this new world, adapting and tailoring their products and services to its ever-evolving demands, while the even savvier are constantly looking to push, lead and help influence the future by pre-empting consumer patterns. These businesses aren’t pushing products at consumers, they’re using social media to hear what products consumers want and then providing them. Welcome to the new world order.

As the consumer demands more and more choice, we’re seeing more and more flexible, small businesses serving the niche markets that cumbersome big businesses are too languid to service and too archaic to identify. Next time you see a household brand collapse, as sad as it is for the employees, ask yourself how many were actually catering for their former customers’ changing needs. Not many.

And for every monolith that crashes into the wasteland there are opportunities aplenty for small businesses waiting to pick up the crumbs and do a superior job. Technology isn’t just fuelling the crash of big businesses, it’s powering the rise of small businesses as well. And here’s where the rules have changed in your favour.

All the costs of starting a business – which for years have been prohibitive to those without money and given the power to those with money – have all but been eroded. The fundamental and crucial components you need to start and establish a business are, by the day, becoming almost free.

Serious barriers to entry such as the cost of building a website or hiring a developer and a marketing executive, which even three years ago might have cost £50,000 – £100,000 – have now almost disappeared.

Brilliant ideas which could have become billion-dollar businesses but never got past a failed bank loan application now don’t need that bank loan. Their founders can start growing that business regardless and then prove they’re worth investing in once they’ve established a customer base.

You can turn yourself into an expert and a respected brand on Twitter, build yourself a website on WordPress, start trading globally on eBay and hire your first employees without spending any real money or even thinking about an office – and all before you’ve even quit your day job. Do you know what? You might never quit your day job!

There isn’t one path any more. The options aren’t few and constrictive, they’re many and empowering. There’s no one way to start or run a business any longer. Instead there are many ways and you’re free to choose the one that’s right for you. Business has been democratised. You don’t need to be skilled, you just need to put the time in – and you no longer require vast sums of money either. In the new world order of business, skills are cheap and passion, knowledge and time are the important currencies.

Collaboration has replaced obsessive and defensive competition. We no longer see ourselves as one person or one small business fiercely competing against all the thousands of other businesses. Instead we’re starting – or at least the smartest businesses are starting – to work collaboratively with other small businesses.

More businesses will form alliances, if not full joint ventures, with other small businesses, whereby you can work together for the shared, greater good rather than competing with each other. The successful entrepreneurs of this decade won’t be hard-nosed sales tycoons or, contrary to popular belief, social media gurus, but simply people who understand people.

Those leaders who stay close to their customers, their staff and their partners and build powerful relationships with all three will prosper and be those most able to capitalize on change.

The business landscape will change still further. There will be more small businesses and fewer big businesses. Obviously you’ll always have the multinationals, your BPs, your Tescos, your BTs, but there will be fewer of them. For every 200-employee business there will be ten 20-person companies working more flexibly and creatively, in terms of both how they do business and how they do their work.

Of course, not everyone who starts up a business will survive. Opportunity ensures nothing. With the explosion in opportunity and the number of small businesses, the need to be exceptional at what you do only intensifies. Being exceptional will be the benchmark for business success in the 2010s, whether you’re big or small, well established or a day old. Be exceptional and people will want to work with you and spend their money with you.

To be exceptional you have to go over and above what other people are prepared to do. So success depends on whether you’re prepared to go the extra mile in customer service or put in the another hour on a Sunday night, on how you treat your employees, partners and customers, on whether you’re able to think innovatively and embrace change.

The truth is, what we know today could be completely outdated in a year’s time. There are people who still cling to the belief that what worked in the 1980s and 1990s and made them successful will carry on working now. In some way they might be right, but as a whole what’s working now won’t work in two years’ time and you’ve got to keep adapting.

If there’s one thing you won’t find from the entrepreneurs and business leaders offering advice in this book, it’s predictions about how the business landscape will look in 10 years’ time. Why? Because they don’t know. But what they do know is you can’t look to the past either. You can only chase the future by embracing the present.

Encouraging though it is, this isn’t news. Two of the bestselling business books in recent years, by our friends Sahar Hashemi and Duncan Bannatyne, have taken the title Anyone Can Do It and demonstrated how anyone, from any background and without any formal business training, qualifications or training, can apply themselves and achieve astonishing levels of success.

We know this and the business world, as highlighted by Smarta.com, is increasingly full of brilliant, inspirational stories of people who’ve battled against the odds to achieve business success. Not everyone will succeed in business, of course. But for the first time, the opportunity to work for yourself and monetise your talent is open and accessible to all.

While technology has completely reconfigured key business functions, it has also led a cultural and ideological shift. More people now believe they can start a business and more people want to. In the past they might have wanted to do, and in practice actually been capable of doing so, but for whatever reasons felt it was beyond them.

For decades, one of the chief psychological barriers preventing many more people starting their own business has been the perceived level of risk involved. While embraced by true entrepreneurs, risk is something generally associated with danger for most people and so best avoided. And let’s face it, most of us aren’t risk-takers. Happily, many business people aren’t either. Fortunately then the costs of starting and marketing a business have become so low, what might once have felt like an almighty gamble is now much more of a calculated risk.

Ten years ago when the Tomorrow’s World notion of starting a business for next to nothing in a matter of minutes with just a laptop and a mobile started to emerge, it was at best fanciful and worked better as iconography than in reality. You couldn’t make a decent e-commerce website for under £20,000 and while you might be able to work from home and on your own, you were in trouble the minute you left your phone. It simply wasn’t real life.

Now the financial cost of starting a business and the skills needed have also transformed. Now the notion of making your own website is an acceptable one without the caveat ‘but only if you’ve got pretty damn impressive HMTL skills’. It’s a given anyone can have a go at doing it. We’re beyond early adopter stage. Setting up a website now isn’t only for techies who understand the potential and know how to use the technology. We are at the next stage where the tools are legitimately useable for those who try.

It’s also too simplistic to say that anyone on the demographic fringes previously restricted by cost and time, such as those with children, those with low earnings and students, are now more likely to start businesses. While it’s true that they undoubtedly benefit from the advancements and shifts we’re seeing, the benefits are empowering for everyone.

More than anything, technology has created a belief: an entrepreneurial or enterprise mindset, shared by more people than ever before. Whether you’re 21 or 51 and running any type of business, you can take advantage of the new tools and opportunities open to you and harness the power of social media and its various gadgets and widgets to make you more productive, become more competitive and help you secure more customers.

What you need is a mindset that embraces the opportunity and doesn’t stand still, ignore the potential or be scared off by any obstacles. The real shift is the drawing of a new starting line in the sand, the levellad in business was not stopped from doing so, undoubtedly it remained harder for some than others. But now skills are cheap and ideas and knowledge are valuable. With many of the traditional obstacles removed, anyone with the intellectual property and entrepreneurial mindset can succeed.

In addition, whether it’s been statistically proven or not, it’s now widely perceived to be safer to start a business than it was in the past. ‘Starting your own business’ is the number one career choice of young people under the age of 23. Given that we institutionalize people through education, and more often than not parental guidance, to pick a safe and earnest career, that’s a quite a compelling fact.

Jobs for life certainly don’t exist any longer. So if there isn’t a safe job, what’s the next safest thing you can do? When you work for yourself you’re in control of your own destiny. You are responsible for whether something succeeds or not. As the costs of starting up fall and the need to borrow diminishes, so does the level of risk. People of all ages are seeing starting a business as an equal career choice to becoming an accountant or a lawyer or any other career where ultimately your performance doesn’t necessarily dictate how secure your income is.

Starting a business has growing appeal for all ages. Those towards the end of their traditional careers are beginning to see it as an opportunity to utilize all the skills and experiences they’ve picked up to earn money for themselves and take on a new challenge. Young people tend to have fewer responsibilities and see running their own business as a viable career option that’s just as valid as becoming a teacher or a lawyer. Given that the average student debt now tops £23,500, there’s certainly a case for it being a cheaper option.

Welcome to the enterprise nation.

How do we propose you do this? You take whatever the niche is that you know most about and build a personal brand around it. You become known. You become the place to hear, find out, trust and buy. You become the person people think of first when they think about that subject. You’re who people recommend.

You make content around your passion and knowledge – blogs, video blogs, photographs, webchats; you use social media networks to engage in conversations around your chosen subject; and you work non-stop to make your content the de facto destination for the latest advice, comment, news, gossip and anything else.

Let’s be clear, we’re not talking about churning out a couple of blogs here. The idea is that you work harder than anyone on the internet in your niche. Really. Harder than magazines, newspapers and television do in the same area. That’s why you need a niche: focus on something that the mainstream don’t do justice to and you can, for all the people who, like you, wish there was more great content for them to consume.

Your content has to be exceptional – not necessarily in terms of production quality, but in the value it delivers to people who really care about the subject you share a connection with. The more passionate your content is, the more stripped down and in depth it is, the better. For this to work you have to be producing something original and authentic. Faking it just won’t wash: people will see through you and you just won’t be able to create content that’s good enough.

You also need to know how to push your content. You’ll need to drive all the social networks and media spots hard. That’s not just about sending out your content, either. It’s about engaging in conversations, debates and arguments that are happening in your niche, whoever is having them and wherever they’re going on. You need to be proactive in finding them and then play an influential role. Likewise, you need to be on call as close to 24/7 as you can to be helping people out and answering any questions they have that they expect you to know the answers to.

Sounds like hard work, right? Well, it will be. But at least it’ll be your own hard work, for you. And depending on how well you do it, fairly quickly you’ll start to gather a very healthy brand and a set of followers who see you as a ‘super editor’ or ‘knowledge centre’ for your subject.

This following – your tribe, as it’s been dubbed – is how you’ll eventually make some money for all your hard work. There’s a school of thought that you should grow your tribe first and look to monetize it later by building product around it and working with affiliate marketers to draw revenues from the audience you attract. The jury appears to be out about how realistic that is and for how many people.

However, it’s more than conceivable that should you hustle your way to the top and genuinely become the main authority on the web for your chosen subject, there would be numerous ways to make that a lucrative accolade. But, how many niches are there up for the taking and what are your chances of usurping the incumbents?

Well, never say never, but we suspect the rewards won’t be so great for being the 72nd UK authority on stamp collecting. That said, if stamp collecting was your passion and you started a company selling stamps, doing all of the above – even if you only rose as high as 72nd in the ranks – wouldn’t be a bad idea. It would certainly be a lot more productive and better value than taking out advertisements in stamp magazines, local newspapers, office windows, with Yell or buying pay-per-click advertising as your other options to attract customers.

Plus your tribe, no matter how modest, would also have a longer-term, recurring value in terms of repeat sales and personal recommendations.

Just because you’re building a world around you and for almost zero cost, you shouldn’t stop looking to grow with the help of others. Indeed, you absolutely should seek others to help you get ahead quicker. This doesn’t mean employing people, but looking to swap skills and resources with other individuals and, if there is any resource available, outsourcing work.

The small business world is fast becoming a vibrant hub of individuals exchanging and trading to help each other get ahead without the need to burden themselves with the cost of employees. Businesses will never stop needing people, but increasingly many can now cope without employees.

Don’t just think about how you can broadcast your expertise, but how you can trade it and use as a bartering tool to get ahead. It doesn’t mean you spend your time slogging away for other people – that would defeat the purpose of working for yourself. Instead it means getting connecting and networking hard with other small businesses so you can share skills, make bulk orders together, collaborate on marketing campaigns.

Building a personal brand should be the most public thing you ever do. And the more people you can feed off, the wider known and more powerful your specialist knowledge will be.

The principal shift in business rules would be the same as well: instead of deploying your skills or knowledge for someone else’s benefit, you’ll be working for yourself.

In an economy where skills are cheap and knowledge is priceless, those with the knowledge have exciting opportunities ahead. The landgrab to become the expert in your niche might already be well under way, but unlike the battle for market share in the past, it’ll be your expertise and ability to communicate through social media that will mark out your chances of success in the new world order of business.

Social media is business, unequivocally. There’s not a business that shouldn’t be using it in one way or another, certainly not a business owner that shouldn’t be – indeed, the smartest business owners and business people are already putting social media at the heart of their businesses.

Before you write us off as raving social media evangelists, let us explain why. We actually think social media is a bad name. Social media would be far better understood if it were called ‘collaborative business’ – because that’s what it is. If it were called that, people would immediately think of it as a business tool and shed all connotations of it not being serious or even not for business.

Social media is serious and it’s also here to stay. Social media is the next generation of business communication and is powering the next phase of business collaboration. We progressed from riding a horse to travelling by cart to a car to a plane. In the same way, social media is a natural development of our ability to communicate. It has many far-reaching powers, but it’s no more complicated than that. It’s just a newer, faster, easier way of communicating that lets us interact with more people simultaneously, build relationships more quickly and amplify all the good things that we’re doing.

Every business can find a way of using social media better, whether it’s finding, understanding, keeping tabs on or interacting with its customer base and competitors, doing research and development, a bit of marketing, developing powerful business relationships or being proactive in dealing with a crisis.

Whether you’re Nestlé in the middle of a PR disaster and using social media effectively as part of your response or a hairdresser using it to tweet when the snow means you’ll have to cancel half your appointments or putting out a special offer for your customers, social media has quickly evolved as the No. 1 business communication tool. It’s real time, it reaches more people than anything else on the planet and, bar the time you put in, it’s free.

When we look at the changing face of business, social media is arguably the key driver in lowering the barriers to entry and levelling the playing field between large and small companies. We believe it should play such an integral role in the way you shape your business that social media is woven into many of the chapters of this book. However, there are also specific chapters examining how smart companies are using it well and how best to use, what in our opinion is the daddy of all business social networks, Twitter. It’s also worth checking out the chapters on collaboration and networking, which have a strong social media slant.

For now though, let’s focus on just why social media is so important, for any cynics out there still convinced it’s not really for them. How can we say that with such self-assurance? Easy. We just keep coming back to the same old argument: because your customers use it.

Yes, even yours. Unless, that is, you honestly think your customers aren’t one of the 500 million Facebook users or 165 million Twitter users or 75 million LinkedIn users or responsible for any of the 200 billion videos viewed on YouTube every single day.

It’s hard to believe you couldn’t be convinced by these stats, but just in case you aren’t, how about getting your head around this: 71% of the global online community used social media during March 2010 alone. It’s estimated a mind blowing 859 million people are using social media. Quite simply, your customers are among them – and we guarantee by the time you read this, the figures will be out of date and larger again.

Social media has changed the way we behave as customers, clients and consumers – and so it has to change the way we behave as businesses. Fortunately all of this change is to your advantage and empowering you to build products and deliver services your customers really want, and to find new customers far easier than ever before.

There’s no disputing it, even if you’re only listening to Twitter and Facebook you’re better informed as a business owner about your customers’ behaviour. In turn, there’s a strong case that almost every business should have a blog and be on at least one (and almost certainly more) of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, FourSquare, Flickr or more trade-specific sites such as Trip Advisor.

The case looks even stronger when you consider the disadvantage of not being on there, not having profile in front of your customers, not listening and being aware of what your customers and competitors are saying in your market place – as well as missing out on the personal profiling and networking opportunity social media offers.

In truth, you can’t afford to ignore social media. Your entire business reputation is likely to be made and judged on it. Only 14% of consumers trust ads, yet 70% trust bloggers. 78% value personal recommendation above anything else and are willing to pay more for products rated highly by others. Social media is fundamental to business success in the modern world and will only become more so. That is why it’s not ‘marketing’ it’s just ‘business’

We’re not denying any of that (and we’d like more breaks for small business owners), but what you’re not seeing publicized is how this is also a fabulous, opportunity-rich time to be running a small business. While the economy has nose dived, the technological and cultural shifts of recent years have been to the advantage of small business owners savvy enough to take advantage.

As we covered in the last chapter, the emergence of social media has levelled the playing field, giving small businesses access to marketing opportunities they could previously only dream about.

This means that, along with lower production costs to launch websites and make content, it’s not just cheaper to start a small business, but more viable to stay small, nimble and extra flexible for longer. There are now alternative ways to take on employees, which means you no longer require offices to seat them in and can deploy your resources instead on building better products and services and chasing bigger deals.

What is more, the growing appetite among small companies for collaborating formally and informally to catalyse their reach, buying and bidding power, access to skills and specialist resources is eating every day into the competitive advantage that money traditionally brought big business.

We’ve also seen a strange dichotomy that as fast as we move forward technologically, we’re also reverting to the past in our desire for the local, authentic and real. We’ve grown tired of faceless organizations, call centre robots answering our specific questions with generic answers from a script which translates into 19 different languages and the dubious ethics behind corporate brands that answer to no one.

More than ever, consumers want to be treated as the individuals they are, to be listened to, to be made to feel special and to perceive they’re receiving value for their spend. What is more, for many purchases they’re prepared to pay a fair price for value as well – even if they’re on a budget, price alone does not dictate many people’s buying decisions. Consumers are increasingly demanding trust: they want to know about the people behind the companies they buy from, how their products are sourced or manufactured and about the business’s ethics. They want to be able to ask questions and to get responses.

It’s not only consumers who feel this way, either. It’s employees as well. More top earners are leaving corporate roles and, if they’re not starting their own business, are taking jobs in small companies where they’re treated like individuals not numbers, feel they’re listened to, and where they’re making a compelling contribution and are rewarded not with a bonus but with a slice of the profits they’ve directly helped earn or shares in a company they’re helping to grow. Alternatively they’re opting for careers in social enterprises, where their work benefits not them or any individual but a cause.