Meet the agony aunt service for small businesses that is ideal for AS business students

Q. I am a self-employed designer and my business is getting very busy. Are there any rules to help me decide when to take on my first employee? The answer is…

Think carefully about employing your first employee. What do you really need doing? Can the workload be outsourced. Do you have enough work for the new person to perform?

That’s not my answer, but in fact the response of a superb monthly resource in the Independent newspaper - Adventures in Micro-Businesss. Each month Professor Russell Smith answers questions posed by small business entrepreneurs.

Questions such as:

Q. I would like to start a business but have no sales experience. Where can I find out more about how best to market my proposed business services and products?

Q. After several good years my business is starting to struggle. What are the most important things that I should do in order to turn this around?

Fantastic content for any business studies teacher - particularly if you are putting resources together for the new AS units focusing on small businesses (Edexcel & AQA).

You could pose a couple of questions to the students and ask them to take the role of agony aunt (or whatever the business equivalent of that role is). The compare the student answers with that of the “expert”.

Well worth bookmarking this series.