Filed under: small business
12 storiesThe archive, indexed. Every story carries its tags at the foot of the page.
39% of UK founders earn under £25,000 before cutting their pay
A survey of 295 UK founders found most took a pay cut in the past year, averaging £13,940. The money they gave up is, in practice, unrecorded runway.
Denver café keeps drip at $3.50 while launching tenth city menu
Hot Shot Coffee opens its Hokkaido menu on 18 October, inside a York Street dry cleaner that stood empty for 14 years.
Idearium evolves from agency work into AI-enabled operations
Alexia Rondon Zamora is turning her digital agency into an operations service for small firms. She says the model is still being validated, and there are no customer numbers yet.
Corridor raises $25m seed for small-business health benefits
A four-person founding team says brokers skip small accounts because the commissions are thin and the work is not. Bain Capital Ventures has put money behind the argument.
Angle Health raises $200m at $2.7bn on 5,000 small-business clients
The insurance startup sells level-funded health plans to small employers, and says it is profitable. Here is what level-funding actually commits a founder to.
Rates relief threshold could rise from £12,000 in 28 October Budget
Chancellor John Healey is reported to be weighing a higher small business rates relief threshold. Uprating the frozen £12,000 figure for inflation would take it to £17,096.
When hiring fails, some founders buy the firm instead
One founder could not recruit the skills her business needed, so she acquired a company that already had them. The case for treating a small acquisition as a hiring decision.
£10m hospitality grant opens to applications at end of September
The government has put £10m behind new pubs, cafes and restaurants, with £3m ring-fenced for a rural pubs charity. Grant sizes have not been published.
94 search funds launched in a year as MBAs buy their way to CEO
Business school graduates in the US are borrowing to buy established small firms and appoint themselves boss. One doubled her company in two years. Another closed his and filed for personal bankruptcy.
Inc: 65% of small firms carry a books problem that kills sales
Accounts built to satisfy a tax return are not accounts built to satisfy a buyer. A US report puts the share of small businesses with that gap at 65 per cent.
Social value weighting doubles to 20% in £90bn procurement shake-up
From 1 January 2027, bidders for large central government contracts will be scored on the jobs and training they create, not on net zero or equality measures. Small suppliers get a higher threshold before the rules bite.
Mailchimp sold for $12bn without raising a round
Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius built an email tool as a side project inside their web design agency. Twenty years later Intuit bought it for about $12 billion.