When you are cash strapped and resource hungry, how do you beat the odds and increase your chances of becoming a successful social entrepreneur?

When should we attempt to enter the market? When can we start to talk about our ideas? And who else is doing the same thing?

Every business is different and enjoys a distinct journey - past and future. Furthermore, each business owner or manager is different and will undertake a personal growth journey specific to them. Here are 8 lessons BGP delegates have learnt about themselves and about their business on the programme - in their own, unedited words...

More than half of business start-ups fail after four to five years, and of those that survive only around 4% become successful. One of the aspects that distinguishes these entrepreneurs from the competition is their approach to strategy.

Successful entrepreneurs tend to embrace rather than reject corporate strategies, and they will often trade off or tone down brash entrepreneurial behaviour for a more civilised approach. This results in a strategy with a winning formula for entrepreneurs and...

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 management...

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.

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.

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’.

There’s no doubt that one of the main objectives of any entrepreneur is to have their enterprise grow profitably. To achieve this, it is very important to understand the factors that contribute to growth.