New research has revealed that the best way for businesses to succeed on Dragons’ Den is to reject any offer they receive. The research, carried out by SEO agency Dark Horse, analysed 1,232 pitches from series 1 to 23 against the Companies House register to measure how long each business lasted. Of those pitches, 532 attracted at least one offer and 700 did not. The study found that entrepreneurs who said no have consistently done best. Of the 78 businesses offered a Dragon’s money that rejected it, 65.4% are still in business today and on the Companies House register. The…

By Troels Johannesen Small firms are quietly putting AI agents on quotes, bookkeeping prep, customer replies and scheduling. The tools are useful. The problem is simpler: most owners still cannot say what the agents did last week, how long it took, or who checked the work before it left the building. Below are five rules that work in a typical small service business. They are about ownership and records, not about buying software. 1. Give every agent a named owner An agent without an owner becomes nobody’s problem. Put a person next to each one on the rota, the same…

Businesses measure sales, margins, costs and cash flow with increasing scrutiny. So why does marketing still get away with reporting impressions, engagement and website traffic? Here, Paul Houston, co-founder of Catalyst Marketing Agency, argues that SMEs need to connect marketing much more closely to the commercial outcomes the rest of the business already measures. A business owner knows their margins, watches cash flow, monitors sales performance, and clearly wants to understand where the next deal is coming from. But marketing has tended to get away with less stringency over the years, and a report showing website visits are up, LinkedIn…

Before increasing your website promotion budget, ask someone unfamiliar with your business to try one useful task on their phone. Watch what happens. A visitor who cannot find your service area or send an enquiry has given you a specific problem to fix before you pay to bring more people to the same page. This is a small observation exercise you can run yourself. It will not explain every lost sale, measure demand or establish why all visitors leave. It can reveal confusing wording, missing information and broken actions that are easy to overlook when you know your own website.…

By Michelle Reece Franchising is typically built on consistency but avoids standardisation at all costs. Every franchise has a defined operating model: how customers book, how services are delivered and how franchisees run their day-to-day operations. Yet when it comes to software, many franchisors find themselves adopting platforms that quietly force them to compromise those very systems. Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms are designed for scale, but they scale by simplifying complexity. For early-stage operators, that’s ideal. For franchisors, it creates tension: central control versus local flexibility, standard processes versus real-world variation and brand consistency versus platform limitations. Over…

Prime Minister Andy Burnham has committed the Government to legislating on non-compete clauses, though employment lawyers say businesses are still waiting to find out what the changes will look like. Speaking at the Innovation Nation Summit in Manchester on 9 October, the Prime Minister confirmed the Government will introduce legislation to crack down on non-compete clauses that “trap” workers and act as a “drag on innovation”. He described the plans as the “Bosman ruling for the innovation sector”, but did not set out how the restrictions would be changed. Corinne Aldridge, Head of Employment at Kingsley Napley, said the announcement…

Author, Eugene Ernoult, CMO at  Weglot When companies target a new market, they often fall into the trap of scaling investment before understanding that region’s differences and nuances. This can make international expansion more expensive, with budgets spread too broadly rather than focused on the right audiences. The recently finalised €5bn Scaleup Europe Fund may give businesses more money to invest, but funding alone isn’t the answer. What matters is having the right approach to turn that investment into sustainable growth. Instead, businesses should adopt a community-first strategy. Rather than reaching out widely across a new market, they should focus…

Following news that ASOS customer names and contact details may have been accessed in a cyber incident, Zain Javed, Director of Strategic Growth and Cyber Services at Citation Cyber, explains why shoppers could now face convincing follow-up scams and what the incident reveals about retailers’ reliance on third-party platforms. Does this look like a direct breach of ASOS’s internal systems, or a vulnerability exposed through a third-party supply chain partner? “At this stage, I would be very careful about calling this a direct breach of ASOS’s core systems. “ASOS has said it is investigating unauthorised activity involving third-party platforms it…

Residency-by-investment programmes are growing in demand amongst high-net-worth-individuals (HNWIs), entrepreneurs and families. The wealth of flexibility, enhanced mobility, optionality and lifestyle benefits are clear incentives for ever-increasing numbers of individuals, with the most popular attracting over 10,000 new approvals each year according to the IMF. And there is one such programme which is emerging as a front-runner: Portugal’s Golden Visa. The World Digital Foundation has not only labelled the country as a ‘premier destination for global relocation’ but also conducted research revealing the Golden Visa programme delivered on average six times the return on investment. Uniquely placed to enable European…

BRITAIN’S housing market has stalled – but buyers are starting to come back, prompting a warning that some could make a very expensive mistake by assuming flat house prices mean it is suddenly a good time to buy. New figures from Lloyds show UK house prices were unchanged in September, both compared with the previous month and the same month last year, with the average property now worth £298,441. But there are signs that buyers are returning to the market, with new mortgage enquiries increasing at their fastest rate since February. At the same time, mortgage rates have been edging…

Tuesday 6th October marked six months since Making Tax Digital for Income Tax came into force on the 6th April 2026, a change that in its first year has required sole traders and landlords with annual revenues over £50,000 to keep digital records and update HMRC every quarter, rather than once a year.      With the change still in its infancy and rolling out to owners with revenues over £30,000 in 2027, leading business management platform Tide asked 500 qualifying business owners and landlords how much time the added admin of MTD will require from them. Their answer: six full…

Half of low-performing B2B marketing teams face budget cuts, as falling business confidence adds pressure to prove ROI  More UK businesses expect turnover to fall than rise, and as a result, marketing teams face growing pressure to demonstrate the commercial value of their demand generation strategies. Experts at B2B demand generation agency Sopro have analysed the latest industry insights to reveal where marketing budgets are being allocated, which metrics teams are prioritising, and how businesses can better measure their return on investment. Where B2B demand generation budgets are going? Six in 10 high-performing B2B marketing teams received more budget, while…

UK’s leading HR advisor network says the changes that are intended to support workers risk deepening the jobs crisis and creating further financial pressures for SMEs. The network believes the plans are entirely one-sided and penalise rather than support small businesses; thereby stifling growth and risking further redundancies. Plans to reform zero hours contracts by providing workers with guaranteed hours are both complex and potentially costly to small and medium sized businesses, according to the UK’s leading HR advisor network. The HR Dept, whose 300 HR advisors support more than 6,000 SMEs throughout the UK, does welcome the Government’s commitment…

Shirley Cooper, Crown Representative for SMEs, shares her advice for small business owners thinking about bidding for government work. Drawing on her experience as a business co-founder and advocate for underrepresented groups in procurement, she explains why success starts with knowing your own business. If there’s one thing I wish more small business owners understood before they bid for government work, it’s this: know yourself and your business first. Since the Procurement Act 2023 came into force, government has committed to levelling the playing field for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This commitment was set out in more detail in…

Recent ONS figures have revealed wage growth is slowing to its weakest pace since 2020. Alongside this, employers are holding back on hiring and expanding amid rising employment costs, meaning securing a substantial pay rise may be becoming increasingly difficult for UK workers. To help employees negotiate a pay rise in an incredibly fragile jobs climate, Frances Li, Founder and Director of Biscuit Recruitment, has shared her expertise on how workers can put themselves in the best position to negotiate a pay rise. She says, “Talking about salary can feel awkward, which often leads to people putting off the conversation or…

What a YouTube audience is, and isn’t, worth when you start a business. By Denver Jackson, founder of CalledItMate. When people hear that I run a football YouTube channel with around 60,000 subscribers, they usually assume that launching a business on the back of it was easy. Six months after launching CalledItMate, a free live football prediction game that I built on my own, I can say that an audience is worth a lot, but not in the way most people think. Where did the idea come from? I host live watchalongs on my channel, including Bolton Wanderers games. During…