Happy New Year from Business First!

Bloodied but hopefully unbowed, businesses who made it through 2009 are contemplating the coming twelve months with the usual mix of optimism and dread. An election looms. Will it make a difference? Are businesses sufficiently bored with gloom and misery to be more adventurous in the coming year, regardless of how bad the pundits’ prognostications may be?

If enough of us decide we are, perhaps that in itself will be enough to turn the ship of doom around. After all, the decisions we business people make on a daily basis are what keeps the country going, for better or for worse.

Our attitude to the recession was captured brilliantly by one young business leader (whose exploits with Richard Branson in Africa are recounted in this issue). In response to queries prefaced with the phrase ‘When things get back to normal…’ he replies, ‘NOW is normal. Deal with it!’

Quite right. While others are waiting tremulously in the trenches for the sun to shine once more, you could be out there capturing their territory.

But to do that effectively, you must have confidence in the fundamentals of your business, which is why the theme of this issue is Branding. Any failure to align your brand with the core values of your business will, at best, cause you to operate inefficiently. At worst it will seriously damage you. We also look at the history of one of Britain’s great brands, the gun makers Holland & Holland, as well as bringing you the usual mix of entertaining, informative and hopefully inspirational content.

To read the on-line edition, go to this link.

If you would like your own hard copy, please subscribe via our web site  and navigate to the Subscription form. If you are already a subscriber, your copy will be on its way in the next few days.

Enjoy!

This entry was posted on Friday, January 8th, 2010 at 10:47 am and is filed under Fresh News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.