Small businesses hold the key

The recent Quarterly Survey of Small Businesses in Britain by the Open University Small Enterprise Research Team showed that the number one irritant for small businesses is dealing with Red Tape.

This is not news; it is the same output from every small business survey undertaken since the adolescent Mr Gallup first started asking questions of his father and other dairy farmers in Jefferson Iowa before the First World War.

It is easy to blame the government; after all, the people who actually do most of the hard work are their civil servants, who invented Red Tape in the first place. Yet listening to the Prime Minister this week, you realise that his heart is in the right place.

He knows that the only people who are going to get us out of the recession are the UK's four million small businesses, not the people in the public sector who spend the money provided by the taxpayers, nor the large companies who are uniformly cutting costs and laying people off.

We entrepreneurs are now assiduously looking for gaps in the market and trying to sell our way out of the recession. We welcome the Prime Minister's announcement that those of us with the patience to do businesses with government will now get paid in ten rather than thirty days.

We eagerly await the new broom at the UK Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, Peter Mandelson, someone who we feel has exactly the right credentials and track record in finding ways around the regulatory system, an activity very close to our hearts.

But if entrepreneurs take an honest look at ourselves, we need to understand that the problem is not one-sided. An entrepreneur is typically good at starting, but poor at finishing things.

This means that when we are presented with any king of regulation or even simple form-filling, our attention span wavers. When the crisis inevitably catches up with us, we find ourselves sitting uncomfortably, like naughty schoolchildren, being scolded by an accountant or bank manager, who tells tales of the dire consequences for our actions in a language we can hardly understand.

My advice is for an entrepreneur is instead to rejoice in their failings listed above, cherish them as their added value to the universe, and immediately go and find an 'Accumulator'.

The 'Accumulator' is one of the entrepreneur profiles in Roger Hamilton's Wealth Dynamics system. Hamilton explains that there are in fact eight different ways people can create wealth for themselves and others. For example, the stereotypical entrepreneur detailed above, good at generating ideas but not at finishing them, might be a 'Creator', like Sir Richard Branson. An 'Accumulator' is someone more like Warren Buffett.

Accumulators have spent the last ten years quietly saving money. They now have cash and they know how to make the best of a recession by hoovering up cheap assets. Right now there are plenty of property bargains as well as many highly skilled ex-bankers on the market with a much more realistic view of their next few years' bonuses. All entrepreneurs need an Accumulator; the trick is to find someone you like, who shares your values.

- The writer is a best-selling author, keynote speaker and entrepreneur mentor, co-founder of Beermat.biz, an on-line resource for entrepreneurs.