Could there be a better time to run a small business?

This was of particular interest to the NACFB because we play our part in the chain of finance from lender to SME, and the audience was full of small business owners being invited to participate, so it was a chance to hear from the horses’ mouth exactly what challenges are facing SME UK.

The phrase "there couldn’t be a better time to run a small business" sounds questionable when an MP says it – you might wonder about the political motivation for such a claim. But when an independent and respected journalist makes such a claim, it’s less easy to be cynical. In any case, Simon attributes much of the credit not to Government policy but to the fact that the price of oil has halved since July 2014. As he points out, no one political party is trying to take the credit for that.

SMEs also face new challenges from auto-enrolment and the imposition of the rising minimum wage, developments which benefit individuals while adding a little extra workload to business owners. The government is trying to create win-win scenarios, as nobody loses any money from auto-enrolment except the Govt itself (and let's forget for a moment that the Govt is simply spending by proxy money that workers have earned). Similarly with the minimum wage, an easy sell when you point out that neither setting nor raising the minimum wage has any positive impact on the well-off (who don't need the financial help, but who rather inconveniently turn out to be quite good at appearing in polling booths). But to a certain size of business, a hike in the minimum wage can put a spanner in expansion plans. Deciding whether you can afford to hire a new full-time member of staff is a fine balancing act, and the higher the minimum wage, the harder it is to take a first step on the tightrope and the easier it is to delay that step.

About half of the business owners making up the unscientifically selected audience agreed that they felt more confident – one, for example, gave his own case that his business was moving from his home office to commercial premises. The other half said they were not more confident, naming, amongst other issues, price-squeezing affecting the retail market, suggesting that there are sometimes too many hands grabbing for the same slice of the pie.

Their poll of over 4,000 UK small and medium sized businesses shows nearly half stating that their business partners are neither interested in fostering long-term relationships (47 per cent), nor open to negotiating payment terms (46 per cent).

So not everything is rosy in the garden of SME UK, but if the jury’s still out on whether life is the best it could possibly be,  the one thing we can say confidently is that there are more good active lenders than ever before – 120 of them being patrons of the NACFB