GUEST BLOG: The Lockdown With Bryan Bruce Day 15 :How can I keep my small business going?
As an employer can I apply for the Job Subsidy?
As an employee ,what can you do if your employer doesn’t apply for it?
What can I be doing in my business today to make sure it manages to continue after the lockdown.
Yesterday I had the pleasure of talking with Michael Barnett who is the CEO of The Auckland Chamber Of Commerce about the dificulties small business owners are facing right now because of the lockdown and what planning they can be doing right now so they can hit the ground running when we are all allowed out to play in the paddock again.
The Chamber offers a free advice line 0800 543 543 and Michael is offering to set worried Small Business owners with their own mentor for a month.
I thoughoughly enjoyed talking with Michael who has good practical advice to share with the owners of Small Businesses keen to know what the can do to survive this difficult time
Bryan Bruce is one of NZs most respected documentary makers and public intellectuals who has tirelessly exposed NZs neoliberal economic settings as the main cause for social issues.
The problem is greed world wide. Huge chains now run everything in physical locations and on the internet. I do a lot of research for businesses for marketing. Recently I was working no marketing a product for a business on the internet.
What I found was astounding and people do not realize the true facts. As I researched the best way to market the product I can aware that the same companies came up time and time again so I dug deeper. If you would like to purchase an electronic item online you will be presented with several different businesses selling the item or an equivalent. The problem is that all the companies offering the item are owned by the same company. Best buy is not an old internet company but shot to the top of the web searches in 2 weeks. Not possible if you know about internet marketing unless you have the right pedigree. You see they were promoted by their big brother’s websites across the internet as direct links for the parent’s companies. An everyday business could not get those backlinks but huge companies can promote themselves and the search engines let them get away with it. As a marketer I would have my website struck off or de-indexed for doing this as it is called link farming.
If you bother to take time and look at the businesses that come up on the first page of searches you will find that your selection of who to purchase from are all, in fact, the same company. The top 16 businesses on the internet offering you your products are all owned by one company. Do the research if you do not believe me. It is not hard to do.
So now to physical stores, more are owned by huge companies. The governments do not want small businesses as it is too hard to get taxes out of them, think cash sales and not declaring everything. Whereas if we all worked for the big boys we would be takes on our wages and they could get every penny from us they can. Look at how much tax Amazone pay from their profits, this also applied to Apple, eBay and just about all large companies. They pay percentages in the range between 3 to 7 percent. Again easy to find information. Shame I can not put links to information on here.