What could you achieve in 20 minutes? Catch-up on emails, make that call you keep putting off, take a quick look at the figures and see if you're on track? OR, create a 14-page business growth plan that will benchmark you against some of the UK's most successful entrepreneurs?

Guest blog, provided by Sean Singleton, BGP Alumni, Managing Director at Your Favourite Story.

The beauty of digital marketing is it allows SME businesses to punch massively above their weight. However, it's not easy and requires effort and expertise.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for SME businesses to find new effective routes to engage customers at every level. As product lifecycles continue to decrease and brand loyalty is at an all-time low, businesses must re-examine marketing...

When it comes to achieving success in business, the route to the top is not dissimilar to that taken by elite athletes. Top performers in sport and business understand how to optimise their psychological and physical strengths to cope well under pressure.

Believe it or not, conflict in the workplace can be a good thing, it can also be a very bad thing. In simple terms, conflict is a form of interaction between parties who differ in interests, perceptions or preferences. It is an inevitable part of organisational life and can take many forms.

Pressure to meet performance targets, lack of resources, rapid organisational change and power differences may all give rise to conflict and as a result, effective conflict handling is a critical...

Family businesses make numerous, critical contributions to the economy and to family wellbeing. This is both in terms of money / income and such intangibles as time, flexibility, control and personal expertise …

... that’s if they work. When they don’t, family businesses can be difficult to manage and painful experiences, at best.

There is an urgent need to help find ideas and propositions that have the capacity to transform people’s lives. The drivers for a sea change in entrepreneurship started in 1991 when the Berlin Wall came down and when India and China embraced open(ish) market systems. It’s been said there used to be two labour forces, one in the Soviet (closed) economic system and the other in the capitalist system with one and half billion working people in each. After 1991, we have one overall system of...

Prospective investors usually require business plans as a first step to assess an investment opportunity. In this way, a business plan serves as a means of communicating a new business venture’s potential to an investor in a logical, accessible, and consistent manner.

A good business plan hence needs to carefully articulate the opportunity, the strategy and resource requirements, outline risks and rewards, and introduce the management team.

Our Story by Your Favourite Story

Your Favourite Story are a full-service Digital Marketing Agency based in Spitalfields, London.

Julian Mitchell (Founder & CEO) and Sean Singleton (Managing Director) both attended the Business Growth Programme, this is Julian's story:

Over 100 entrepreneurs have been announced as the finalists in the Great British Entrepreneur Awards 2016.

We’ve worked with more than 700 senior managers in Small to Medium Sized businesses (SMEs) in the last few years, and found a number of issues common to all.  We would like to share our Top 10 with you.

The single, most important difference between successful businesses and also-rans is the quality of the senior team.  The skills shelf-life of new and experienced managers is becoming shorter and shorter.  If we don’t widen and deepen our management skills base our competitors will take our...

In elite sport, a carefully managed goals strategy is very effective in enhancing performance – far superior to vague aspirations or no goals at all.

By paying attention to what works, we can translate much of what we understand from sport into a business context. Psychological research demonstrates that difficult, high-level goals prompt superior performance much more successfully than vague ‘do-your-best’ or no goals.

In the UK, two-thirds of all private sector firms are family businesses, contributing over half of GDP and around 40% of private sector employment.

Most family businesses will want to pass the business on to the next generation but relatively few actually do so – fewer than half of family businesses pass to the second generation, and only a fraction to the third.

Without formal succession planning, family-owned businesses run the risk of not being sustainable. Some owners regard succession...

Two companies founded by BGP alumni were winners at the 2015 National Business Awards.

GoApe, the outdoor adventure company set up by Tristram and Rebecca Mayhew, took home ‘The Customer Focus Award’, while youth marketing agency Livity and co-founders Sam Conniff and Michelle Morgan collected ‘The Social Enterprise of the Year Award’.