PING TMH

[GB]

Bill, perhaps you could say what your specialisation was?

[dennis]

He has a few..

BBC critic and fixing aerials are the well known ones.

[John Rumm]

Where you get to be both slave and slave driver ;-)

Having said that, there are things you are prepared to endure for your own business that you would not dream of entertaining as an employee of another.

[John Rumm]

Usenet legend, raconteur, curmudgeon, TV Aerials erected*:

• with apologies to Terry Pratchett for the Casanunder homage

[Dave Liquorice]

Sneaky feeling that is not the same as the Permenant Health Insurance that I mentioned earlier. A decent Independant Financial Advisor would know, in fact getting proper financial advice might be a Good Idea anyway. How do mortgage companies take to some one switching from wage slave to self employed?

A single small amount of "Use of home as Office" against tax will go unnoticed. What you don't want to do is trying to put 5% or whatever of the household bills against tax or dedicate a room as your office. It can become subject to Business Rates and there could be a "change of use" implications.

[Jeremy Nicoll - news posts]

And many of those are restarurants...

The recent BBC TV series "Restaurant Man" was interesting, in the way it showed a bunch of people trying to set up restaurants. Many of them had scraped together £20k or more of family money and then frittered it away.

Few did any marketing of their new business, and precious little testing of their services (eg how they'd actually run the restaurant, who'd do what, what the dishes on the menu would be, what they cost to produce etc) until prompted to by the mentor. Some didn't even try some of this stuff until a day or two before they opened, leaving no time to fix any of the problems.

Most of the lessons he drummed into people were really just common-sense, and it was appalling how few had it - all the ineptness couldn't just have been a result of devious editing of the footage.

[GB]

I'm scared of heights - or more precisely of falling from heights - so Bill is most welcome to his specialisation. :)

[Huge]

It used to be the case that the Revenue (now HMRC) didn't talk to the local council ratings people so it was quite safe to claim "Use of home as office". I did it for years.

Disclaimer; I haven't been self-employed for over 20 years.

[John Rumm]

Its still a routine deduction made by accountants for directors of Ltd companies working from home (at least partially). So long as the space used is not wholly and exclusively used for business, then business rates / change of use ought not be an issue.

[Tim Watts]

I watched some of the Gordon Ramsay programmes about failing restaurants. Several things I noticed that seemed to fly in the face of the obvious:

1) If having a launch party after changing everything, including the menu and staff roles, for gawd's sake run with the new setup on the quiet a few days before you have a launch with 150% normal covers which is hard enough to cope with anyway, let alone on the first night of a new setup with no practise! 2) Do not appoint several "managers" with no organisational skills and who have no specific pre defined roles wandering around aimlessly (seems to be a common problem, not just with restaurants!). 3) Have a process for everything that is reasonably likely, including especially the core business - eg: making sure customers are tended to within set times, that orders are processed in order and there are checks to ensure things are not overlooked.

If it goes wrong, get the staff together the next afternoon and check and if necessary change the process and make sure everyone knows how it works. If the process is fine, address staff training.

4) Try market testing your food (and even eating it yourself - you'd be surprised how many chefs were turning out crap they hadn't even tasted).

Worse was when Ramsay sorted them out and they ran better for awhile. Then you check the web for what happened after the programme aired and you find out 3/4 of them failed and closed up, often (according to commentators) going back to their original mistakes.

I really wonder sometimes how people can be so bloody dozy. This isn't about circumstances being against them (though everyone faces an element of that) - it really was about things directly under their control.

[Bill Wright]

Communal TV systems.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

Ignore him, he's a pillock.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

If you claim say 20% of your domestic costs against tax, when you sell up HMRC will want 20% of the difference between what you bought the house for and what you got when you seld it.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

They don't like welding and blow torch use.

Bill

No it keeps your prices 20% less 20% of the costs of goods and services cheaper. You can't reclaim the VAT if you aren't registered. There are schemes that suit low turnover firms that are a sort of halfway house. Ask HMRC.

Note that some also try

It's a s**te idea, unless the goods are dodgy.

Yes. You have to bite the bullet. And take the long view. By the way I've recently been doing some fliers (I'm a graphic designer now it appears!) for a firm. They put the fliers in the foyers of estate agents, and pay the agent a fee for every contact. It seems to work.

Bill

>

[Bill Wright]

Yes, deffo. Agree stage payments in advance.

Bill

[Bill Wright]

Yes. Always have rubber johnnies and KY jelly in the van. And a bag to pull over her head if she's a minger.

Bill

[Fredxxx]

Of course it pays to rent!

Unfortunately the law says an expense must be wholly and exclusively for business.

A second land line would be ok, and most IT equipment.

[Nightjar]

I would be dubious of anybody who couldn't produce at least three years' accounts. Five would be better.

Colin Bignell

[Nightjar]

On 13/03/2014 12:11, GB wrote: ...

Falling won't hurt you. Ending the fall might though :-)

Colin Bignell

[www.GymRatZ.co.uk]

There's actually pretty good money to be made as a male escort. You don't even have to be the best looker. We've had a shop customer that did it for a few years. Keeping business ladies company in the evening when they were down on hotel stay aways. More of a "keeping them company and socialising" thing than just being a hump for the night. Though some of that did happen occasionally so we were led to believe...

Pete@