Growth & Strategy

Business Planning

Plan your business's growth

How to decide whether your business is ready to grow, choose how to grow, and understand the legal duties that start when you take on staff, pass the VAT registration threshold, or become a larger company.

Choose a business model

Understand the main business models and choose the right one for your skills, market, and financial situation.

Start a product-based business

A product business needs more money up front than a service business but can earn higher margins as it grows. Before you launch, find and vet reliable suppliers, plan storage and delivery, make sure your products are safe and price them from your true cost per unit.

Conduct business research

How to research a business opportunity, market, or acquisition target using free and paid sources to make informed decisions before committing capital.

Test your business idea

Before you invest, find out whether strangers will pay. Define your customer and what counts as success, research what already exists, talk to likely buyers, then sell a small version for real money. Work out your break-even point to see whether the sums can work.

Write a business plan

Lenders, investors and grant bodies expect a business plan with all 12 standard sections, from an executive summary written last to detailed financial projections. Base every figure on evidence such as supplier quotes or market data, because unrealistic numbers destroy your credibility.

Build a minimum viable product (MVP)

A minimum viable product (MVP) is the simplest version of your product or service that tests one question: will customers pay for it? Set a measurable hypothesis and a 4 to 8 week deadline, test with strangers in your target market, then decide whether to proceed, pivot or stop.

Export market research and selection

How to research overseas markets, assess demand, understand competition, and evaluate market entry costs.

Start a service-based business

A service business is the cheapest kind to start: you sell your skills or time, often for under £5,000, and can earn from the first week. Price from your income target and realistic billable days, and never start work without a written contract and the right insurance.

Understand your competition

List the businesses your customers could use instead of you, direct and indirect, then record the same facts about each: what they sell, what they charge, who they serve and what their customers say. Use public sources, and never agree prices with a competitor.

Define your business proposition

Your business proposition says what your business does, who it serves and why customers should choose you. Start from a specific problem, define a narrow target customer, make your unique selling point specific and hard to copy, then test the proposition on real potential customers before you launch.

Marketing

Identify your intellectual property

Discover what intellectual property your business owns, from brand names and creative content to inventions and designs. Understanding your IP assets is the first step to protecting them.

Follow the rules on advertising and marketing

Adverts must be legal, decent, honest and truthful. The Advertising Standards Authority enforces the CAP Code for non-broadcast advertising, including your own website and social media, and the BCAP Code for broadcast. Consumer and business marketing law, enforced by the CMA and Trading Standards, sits behind it.

Develop your brand identity

Choose the elements of your brand identity: name, logo, colours, typography and tone of voice. If a designer creates any of it, make sure the copyright is assigned to you in a signed written document, because paying the designer does not make you the owner.

Social media for business

The same advertising rules apply on social media as anywhere else. Label every post made in return for payment, gifts, loans or discounts clearly as an ad, including posts by influencers you work with, and never commission, buy or selectively publish reviews, because the CMA can fine you directly for fake reviews.

How business domain names work

You never own a domain name outright. You hold it from a registrar for as long as you keep paying, and anyone can register a name that is free. Trade mark applications are published as soon as they are filed, so secure your domains first and keep them renewed.

Innovation

Deal with IP infringement

If someone copies your brand, design, invention or creative work, check which right you hold, collect dated evidence and contact them carefully: an unjustified threat about a patent, design or trade mark can let them sue you. Most disputes settle without going to court.

Choose how to protect your intellectual property

Copyright and unregistered design right protect your work automatically, but they only stop copying. To get exclusive rights in a brand name, an invention or a product's appearance, you register a trade mark, patent or design with the Intellectual Property Office, and keep it renewed.

Protecting Your Software Intellectual Property

Your source code is protected by copyright automatically, at no cost. A patent, lasting up to 20 years, is available only where software makes a technical contribution, which is a high bar in the UK, and registering trademarks protects your brand and product names.

License your IP to others

Licensing lets another business use your patent, trade mark, design, copyright or know-how in return for payment while you keep ownership. Before you license, make sure your business owns the IP, protect it, decide which markets to keep and value it.

Register a design

How to protect the look of your product with a registered design, how it differs from the automatic unregistered design rights, when to apply, how to prepare illustrations and apply to the Intellectual Property Office, and how to keep your registration in force.

Apply for a UK patent

A UK patent lets you stop others making, using, selling or importing your invention in the UK for up to 20 years. Check it is new and inventive, keep it confidential until you file, then apply to the Intellectual Property Office and request the search and examination yourself.

Make sure you own the IP your staff and contractors create

Your business usually owns what employees create as part of their job, but not what freelancers, agencies or contractors make for you, even when you have paid for it. To own that work, you need a written assignment signed by the person who created it.

Avoid selling counterfeit goods

Selling goods that carry a trade mark without the owner's permission is a criminal offence, with up to 10 years in prison, and Trading Standards can seize suspect stock. Buy only from authorised distributors or brand owners and check authenticity, because evidence of reasonable checks supports a due diligence defence.

Protect your copyright

How copyright protects your business's written content, images, software, designs, music and video, who owns work made by staff and freelancers, how to evidence and mark your work, how to license or sell it, and what to do if someone copies it.

Clear music and image rights for a film, video or advert

Before you put a track in a film, video or advert, you need a licence from the owner of the song and, separately, from the owner of the recording. Photos and footage need the copyright owner's permission too. Get every clearance in writing before release, or you risk an injunction and damages.

Apply for innovation funding

Access Innovate UK grants and competitions for research, development, and game-changing technologies.

Business Change

Avoid breaking competition law

Agreeing prices, bids or customers with competitors, swapping sensitive information or abusing a dominant position breaks the Competition Act 1998, however informal the arrangement. A business can be fined up to 10% of worldwide turnover, and people in a cartel can go to prison.

Joint ventures and strategic partnerships

How to find and check a business partner, choose a structure for a joint venture, agree the terms in writing, and stay within competition law when you work with another business to grow.

Financial Difficulties

Check before appointing company directors

Before appointing a director, check they are legally eligible. Disqualified directors, undischarged bankrupts, people under director disqualification sanctions and anyone under 16 cannot act. Search the disqualified directors register first: letting a disqualified person manage your company can make you personally liable for debts run up while they acted.

Understand director disqualification

A disqualification order or undertaking bars you from acting as a company director, or helping to manage any company, for up to 15 years unless a court gives permission. The usual cause is unfit conduct as a director of an insolvent company, and breaking a ban is a criminal offence.

Exit & Succession

Close a solvent company using Members' Voluntary Liquidation

If your company can pay its debts in full within 12 months, its shareholders can close it by members' voluntary liquidation. The directors make a declaration of solvency, shareholders pass a special resolution and a licensed insolvency practitioner takes over, so what you receive is normally taxed as a capital gain.

Retire from your business

The ways to retire from a business you own, selling it, passing it to family, selling it to your employees, stepping back while keeping ownership, or closing it, and the tax, employment and legal duties each one brings.

Pass your business to family

Giving your business to your children or another relative counts as selling it at market value, so you can owe Capital Gains Tax even if you receive nothing. Gift hold-over relief can pass the gain to them, and Business Relief can cut the Inheritance Tax due if you die within 7 years.

Public Sector Contracting

Prepare a winning tender response

How to write compelling bid documents that score well in public sector evaluations.

Join framework agreements and approved supplier lists

How to become an approved supplier on government framework agreements.

Fair Work First in public procurement

How Fair Work First applies when bidding for Scottish public sector contracts, including the sustainable procurement duty and scored criteria.

Sustainability

Get the permits and safety consents for a hydrogen production site

A hydrogen production site needs planning permission and an environmental permit, and the hydrogen you hold on site sets the safety duties. Dangerous substances rules apply at any quantity, hazardous substances consent from 2 tonnes, and COMAH from 5 tonnes. Government support requires the Low Carbon Hydrogen Standard.

Get development consent for an offshore wind farm

An offshore wind farm of more than 100MW in English waters needs a Development Consent Order from the Secretary of State. The order can deem the marine licence, but not the seabed rights from the Crown Estate or a grid connection, which you secure separately.

Comply with UK Emissions Trading Scheme

If you run a regulated installation or aviation operation, or from 1 July 2026 qualifying ships, monitor your greenhouse gas emissions through the year, submit a verified report by 31 March and surrender enough allowances to cover them by 30 April. Missing these triggers automatic penalties.

Grid Connection for Energy Projects

How to connect electricity generation projects to the UK grid. Understand the difference between DNO and National Grid routes, the G99 connection standard, and the April 2025 Ofgem reforms that promise £5 billion in savings and faster connection timelines.

Guides

Strike off your limited company

If your limited company has stopped trading and can pay its debts, a majority of its directors can apply to Companies House on form DS01 to have it struck off. Send a copy to shareholders, creditors, employees and others within 7 days, or you commit an offence.

Understanding employee share schemes

HMRC offers four tax-advantaged share schemes. Enterprise Management Incentives (EMI) usually suits smaller companies with a qualifying trade, CSOP lets any company reward chosen staff, and SIP and SAYE must be open to all employees. Each must be registered with HMRC before it operates.

Get help to grow your business

Start with the free business support service for your part of the UK: an adviser can review your plans and point you to funding you qualify for. Mentors, management training and government-backed loans can also help you grow.