You may be surprised to hear that there are only 5 ways to increase your profit. It may sound scary, but actually, when laid out in a business framework it is easier for you to work on your business.

  Financiers are getting it wrong, says Allon Raiz: the business plan should not be the primary consideration when deciding to lend money to a small business. This is the fundamental premise of Raiz’s new book, Lose the Business Plan: What they don’t teach you about being an entrepreneur, which hit...

Hi! I;m Barry and used to have a construction business until the recession took it away. I am sure there is many more people like me who lost it all, including the jobs that go with it, but we have to somehow get up and running again.

Problem: What can one do to get finance from a financial institution for a new venture? Here's the bad news: Without at least 80% (and mostly 100%) security for the loan, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!! I have an business plan rated by all banks I applied at as "EXCELLENT". Loan required only R200 000 - R250 000, gross profit estimated around R1.3 mil in the first year, but "Sorry, we can't help you." 20 permanent jobs in 12 months, more to come, good profit, excellent business plan, cheap to run, excellent profit prospects, what more would they need? IDC, Shuttleworth Foundation, Khula, a wheel barrow full of others: NO GO.

Although motivation is a great by-product of the coaching process. The way I see it, if you own your own business, you already have motivation. You either want the big house, car, yacht or whatever else you’re striving for, otherwise you have bills to pay and creditors beating down your door.

Now your motivation may wax and wane and in my experience it moves in direct correlation to how empowered you feel as a business owner. If things are going well, you will feel powerful and motivated. If things aren’t going well and you find yourself thinking from the ‘effect’ side of the cause and effect equation you will feel like you have very little motivation.

Business Coaching is about taking control of your situation, evaluating your options and then taking action. It is in taking action that you are returned to the ‘cause’ side of the cause and effect equation and your motivation returns by the shed load! When I was running my business in London for the past few years I moved from one side to the other side of this equation many times but once I studied how to be a coach and started coaching myself I learned how to get myself back to the right place quickly....

Many people are hesitant to go green. They believe that it is either too expensive or too difficult. Fortunately, this does not have to be the case. Here are some simple and affordable solutions for ‘going green’ at work.

The green movement is essentially about two issues. Firstly, there is the need to limit and decrease global warming. In practice, this looks like using less resources – less fuel, paper and electricity. The second need is to return to more natural ways of living and avoid products with harmful artificial ingredients.

At the office, it is crucial that greening starts with awareness - this can be achieved through a little bit of creativity and some basic staff education. Posters and emails should be created to remind staff of the importance of using fewer resources. This has the enormous added benefit of saving the business money.

Simply put, coaching is a process of identifying viable goals and working towards them with a person who is committed to helping you succeed. It sounds simple, and it is, but business isn’t, and obstacles often get in the way of our success.

Cape Town - The National Youth Development Agency (NYDA) has in its first year extended 7 500 microfinance loans to the value of R23m, Monitoring and Evaluation Minister Collins Chabane said on Wednesday.

He told the National Assembly the NYDA has disbursed a further R3 million in loans to small- and medium-sized enterprises and issued 4 244 business consultancy vouchers worth more than R33m.

Softline buys Netcash

In a deal that has exciting possibilities for SMME's in South Africa, Softline - the provider of South Africa's most popular accounting software - Pastel, has announced that they have acquired Netcash.  Charles Pittaway, Director of Netcash issued a statement as follows:

Many businesses have computers with MS Office already installed but which are either not used at all, or used in a very limited way for some financial record keeping, reporting or document editing.
MS Office, and more specifically the Excel spreadsheet program included therein, is a very powerful business tool for the SMME.