We have had a similar experience ourselves. Upon setting up our business we found that there was no adequate state support, no tax breaks or incentives to help us to develop our business or employ additional consultants.

We were offered a four-day bookkeeping course and at the end of it a £400 grant. This was totally unsuitable to us as we had a financial director/accountant in company as part of the management team.

I am encouraged by the soundbites coming out from the new government regarding encouraging entrepreneurs/setting up new business. However, without adequate business support many new businesses will go bust before they have time to establish themselves.
The best advice that new entrepreneurs can take is that from business owners who have ’been there and done that’ and understand what it feels like to run a business, rather than advisers who claim to understand business but do not have real hands on experience of running their own.
Simon Brady, director, Simply Health Recruitment

This government needs to learn from John Cowperthwaite, previous Governor of Hong Kong, who realised that taxing people for all and sundry was punishing success.
If our government taxed less and interfered less and allowed people to grow and allowed people to be true entrepreneurs, more wealth would be created, more jobs would be created, more confidence in the market place would happen and the economy would improve and then by default the tax man would make more money.
Hong Kong went from a shanty fishing village to the huge financial epicentre that it is today because of John Cowperthwaite’s low taxes.
They don’t have busts of Marx or Lenin in Hong Kong; they do of Cowperthwaite.
Bill Pretty, director, Dragonfly