small business
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Are New Companies House Rules A Trap For Directors?
If you’re a company director in the UK and you’ve been ignoring those emails from Companies House about identity verification, it’s time to stop. As of 18 November 2025, every director and Person with Significant Control (PSC) must verify their identity using biometric data – and the consequences of non-compliance aren’t just annoying, they’re potentially…
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“AI Curious” Why Jargon Won’t Grow Your Business
Most of what’s written about AI for business is theatre. It looks smart, it flatters the writer, and it leaves the average business owner no clearer on what to do when they open the laptop tomorrow morning. The line that set this article off was a perfect example, a headline promising to take organisations “from…
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They’ll Tell You VAT Isn’t Rising. They’re Lying.
In Summary: UPDATE: This didn’t happen (yet) but I’ll leave this here as a reminder of what could still happen one day when Rachel Reeves (or a future holder of the red briefcase) fumbles with the budget calculator. The November 2025 budget could see the VAT registration threshold slashed from £90,000 to around £30,000, forcing…
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The Internet Is Getting Bigger… and Somehow Worse
Today I tried to solve a tiny, a rather technical and boring problem: a cryptic Facebook “About this content” panel nagging that it “could not find a Facebook Page” for my own domain. It was bollocks really because the domain has existed for more than a decade (almost 16 years in fact) and is 100%…
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When “Support” Costs Nothing, It’s Worth Nothing
There’s a type of support that sounds reassuring when people talk about it, looks respectable on the surface, and yet somehow never quite shows up when it actually matters. You’ll recognise it instantly if you’ve ever tried to build something publicly. The Like, The Share, and The Disappearing Act People will like your post. They’ll…
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The Social Media Paradox – What Happened to Reciprocity?
What happened to “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”? For over six years I’ve been running a local community website, Facebook page and Facebook Group with over 12,000 people. In that time I’ve quietly promoted countless local businesses. Loads of them. Most I’ve never met. Most don’t even know I exist because I do…
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Where’s Google? The Search Giant’s Awkward Dance With AI
Google’s not asleep at the wheel. And that’s exactly what makes this moment so blooming interesting. OpenAI has lit the AI fire with ChatGPT, Microsoft is pouring petrol on it with a multibillion-dollar deal, and the one company sitting on the biggest pile of data and infrastructure is suddenly looking… slow, cautious, and oddly vulnerable.…
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The Dog Biscuit Incident: An ADHD Research Tragedy
It started with a dog biscuit. Not an important biscuit. Not a special, vet-prescribed, artisan, cold-pressed, Himalayan-lentil, air-dried biscuit. Just a bog-standard crunchy treat from a tub that had definitely been open for “a while”, in the same way that milk in the fridge is sometimes “probably fine”. A normal person would’ve sniffed it, shrugged,…