Small Business Marketing – Building Relationships is the Key

Small Business Marketing – Building Relationships is the Key

Marketing for small business is different than marketing for national or international brands, which enjoy instant name recognition. By contrast, small business marketing relies heavily on word of mouth and on building and maintaining personal relationships.
This article isn’t about finding new customers, it is about hanging on to the ones you have and building your [...]

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How To Make Someone Who Complains Into a Sales Asset

How To Make Someone Who Complains Into a Sales Asset

No one likes getting complaints from customers but the fact is that if you handle a complaint well you can make the complainer into an asset – someone who will praise your business.
OK, we all know that there are some people you can never please no matter what you do and there are some people [...]

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Running Your Business – How to Present a Professional Image While Working From Home

Running Your Business – How to Present a Professional Image While Working From Home

In the current economic situation and with more people leaving regular employment and setting up as consultants, it has become much more acceptable to run your business from home.
Apart from anything else, running a new business from the spare bedroom removes a whole layer of cost and risk, and makes it a lot more likely [...]

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Accountants Denied Privilege

Accountants Denied Privilege

When I trained as a tax accountant many years ago there was a clear understanding that my duty was to my client and whilst I should not collude in illegal tax evasion or financial irregularity I owed no duty to “rat” on clients to the authorities.
Indeed it was always accepted that anything told to me [...]

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What Is Transfer Pricing?

What Is Transfer Pricing?

“Transfer pricing” is an increasingly important and contentious area of international tax law. This is because so much of modern world trade involves the transfer of goods, intangibles or services within multinational enterprises (MNEs) – groups of companies or related businesses based in 2 or more countries.
Such international trade offers scope for an MNE to [...]

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Political Double Dealing

Political Double Dealing

On his 2008 Presidential campaign trail, Barack Obama made his hostility toward “offshore” jurisdictions very clear:
“There’s a building in the Cayman Islands that houses supposedly 12,000 U.S.-based corporations. That’s either the biggest building in the world or the biggest tax scam in the world, and we know which one it is.”
I know that building well; [...]

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Taxman Faces Writs for VAT Errors

Taxman Faces Writs for VAT Errors

HM Revenue & Customs are facing a flood of legal claims that will blow another massive hole in the public finances.
In the past few weeks thousands of High Court claims have been lodges by companies and local councils relating to millions of pounds of interest wrongly charged by HMRC.
When HMRC makes a repayment to a [...]

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