With trading conditions as difficult as they currently are anything that can help to safeguard your business would seem like a good idea.

One such suggestion is to collaborate with another business.

A successful collaboration will depend on several things, which can be summarised as doing the careful research before you go ahead:

• Are the two businesses a good fit, in other words are they genuinely complementary
• Do they share common values and ideals
• How sound are the finances of those involved
• How much will the set up costs be
• Don’t overestimate the time and money saved and the potential profits

Individual businesses can face several limitations when trying to compete in global markets. This may include scale and expertise.

So there may be financial benefits to collaboration in enabling the partners to tender for larger contracts and to benefit from a wider range of skills among the companies involved.

Swapping skills can also be highly valuable and cost-effective for...

Research by the UK organisation Make UK has found that almost three quarters of UK manufacturers have reshored their supply chains as a result of the disruption caused by the Covid pandemic and more recently the war in Ukraine.

“Nearly half (42%) of manufacturers have increased the proportion of suppliers based in Great Britain, with further reshoring in the pipeline for over two-fifths of companies,” according to their report.

This, together with the change in consumer purchasing habits moving to more online shopping has dramatically increased the demand for warehouse space.

According to latest research by Colliers, industrial occupiers are in a race for space as the UK is experiencing the lowest level of supply ever recorded, with only 18.1 million sq ft left, due to demand for logistics units continuing to be driven by the structural change in consumer spending patterns.

Colliers states that take-up in 2021 for industrial distribution warehouses of 100,000 sq ft+...

As restrictions imposed to control the Covid pandemic are lifted it would be tempting for businesses to ramp up their activity in order to return to pre-pandemic normal.

But problems remain. Materials and components costs have been rising, and still are. The global supply chain is still broken. Recruitment difficulties and labour shortages are still an issue.

Getting all these components right and working smoothly is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle.

We have talked about this before but it seems to be relevant again now.

There is a danger in ramping up activity too quickly as the situation eases. Accountants call it over-trading.

This is when a business runs up a big rush of sales on credit without the cash to pay its suppliers and it can rapidly become insolvent.

It is easy to be misled by the figures on the balance sheet, which may paint an over-optimistic picture of the cash flow forecast, especially when some of this is predicated on fixed assets and on the prospect of new investment...

Business activity is starting to pick up after 18 months of disruption but what lessons have those that survived learned, what new opportunities has it brought and what new practices will businesses keep as a result?

Changes in customer and client needs?

A recently-reported development has been the numbers of staycation bookings for 2022 that are already being made after people decided to holiday in the UK in 2021 due to all the complex rules overseas travel and quarantine on return.

This presents an opportunity for the tourism industry to develop their attractions and offers, notwithstanding some of the difficulties there are in recruiting enough workers.

There may well be opportunities in other businesses in the wider economy to respond with new products and services based on what clients have asked for during the various stages of the pandemic.

Changes in ways of working

While some businesses needed to furlough staff because of a drop in demand during the pandemic others changed...

The UK Prime Minister has signalled a massive infrastructure boost to help the country’s economy to recover post pandemic.

The details and plans for allocation of money are likely to be fleshed out in the autumn but in a speech at the end of last month he indicated that more than £5 billion would be spent on infrastructure projects, many of them in northern and central England as part of his pledge to tackle the imbalance between London and the South and the more deprived regions.

The projects will include spending on hospitals, roads, railways and schools, including what are called “shovel-ready” projects to help businesses and individuals to recover and address the expected mass unemployment.

Business directors should be planning now to take advantage of the proposals, especially those in the construction and tech sectors that are likely to be recipients of the government money.

I know of at least one company, supplying a unique range of thermally...

Businesses planning their post-pandemic strategy are likely to be seeking future investment to shore up their balance sheets but directors will need to be mindful of the changing values of stakeholders and in particular those of their customers who in turn are influencing investors.

Before the immense disruption caused globally by the onset of the pandemic, climate change, global warming and the need for a more sustainable form of economics were a major preoccupation.

That preoccupation has not gone away.

While physical attendance at a second summit on ethical finance by international delegates from Government officials, financial institutions, consumer goods corporations, supply chain intermediaries and conservation organisations planned for Edinburgh this month has had to be cancelled, it has now been replaced by a virtual summit.

And this month, the UK’s Investors Association published a paper on the future of investment in which it, too, identified the importance going...

It is likely that there will be many growth opportunities for companies to embrace the use of technology after the Coronavirus lockdown.

Many organisations and businesses have had to switch to a remote way of continuing to provide their goods and services and this has affected everything from medical consultations to teaching, even more online shopping and whole offices now remote working.

Having discovered that it is possible to function in this way it is likely that many will carry on doing so when restrictions are eased and this will provide growth opportunities for tech companies.

Among the beneficiaries already have been providers of online tools including conferencing facilities, such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Skype, productivity and project management tools like Asana and Trello and online collaborative and co-creation tools like Miro and MURAL.

But for all their benefits there are also caveats in terms of speed and reliability of broadband, security and protection from...

The main UK Key Industries are often still considered to be aviation, aerospace, steel and car production.

As a result of the Coronavirus pandemic and subsequent lockdown the UK Government is working on a plan, called Project Birch, to provide short term bail-outs to those companies “considered strategically important” to the national economy.

However, how to define strategically important? Is it in terms of their contribution to UK GDP (Gross Domestic Product), or to the number of jobs they account for, or to their ability to be viable and profitable businesses that can operate in more normal times without state aid?

It would be reasonable for a Government to consider a business to be strategically important in terms of employment during a crisis, such as now, especially given that some of the above-mentioned Key Industries are in parts of the UK where there is traditionally high unemployment with few alternative job sources, especially when whole communities are...

Business pages are always full of articles claiming that SMEs need more help from the Government.

But equally, there have been a number of upbeat and positive reports that suggest the opposite is the case, so what is the truth?

According to the business lender Iwoca, lending to SMEs in deprived areas has dropped dramatically, by 8% between 2014 and 2018. Iwoca CEO Christoph Rieche has said: “It’s concerning that, in many parts of the country, major banks aren’t serving small and microbusinesses with the funding required to help them thrive. SMEs are vital for the health of the economy.”

The figures are borne out by UK Finance, which has revealed that small business loans and overdraft balances from big banks fell by almost 16% in the North West between the end of 2014 and September last year, from £9.8bn to £8.2bn, while loans and overdraft balances in London fell by only 2.3%. Wales saw a 14.2% drop, while Yorkshire and the Humber posted a 10.9%...

UK business activity is either in a woeful state, or slowly picking up speed following December’s general election, depending on who you are listening to.

Given the dire insolvency figures for 2019, which I covered in Tuesday’s blog, there is clearly plenty wrong in specific sectors of the economy.

The construction industry, High Street retail and the accommodation and food services were the worst-affected last year but it would be foolish to pretend that any business, from SME to large corporations had an easy time given the global economic slowdown and, more recently, figures revealing that the EU economy is near-stagnant.

Nevertheless, now that the withdrawal of the UK from the EU has passed its first hurdle and that the government has a clear mandate with a huge majority to implement its decisions for the next five years, there are signs of optimism.

The first Lloyds Bank Commercial Banking Business Barometer in 2020 showed a 13-point increase in business confidence,...