Member Article

Don’t listen to the doubters - small business owners put the hours in

There’s a new report published this week that claims that small business owners in the UK work fewer hours than their counterparts in the US, Germany, France, Netherlands or Spain, writes Howard Robinson of Ingenious Britain.

It is unhelpful and does not reflect the reality of many of Britain’s small business owners.

The survey, funded by the insurance company Hiscox, surveyed 500 small businesses in the six countries. It claims that British entrepreneurs worked an average of 37.6 hours a week compared with an average of over 41 hours.

At Ingenious Britain, we think this is really the least helpful kind of research put together and then presented as a factual representation of a whole sector.

There are five million SMEs in the UK and it would seem that Hiscox have surveyed around 80 of them and presented this as representative. The SME sector is vital to the UK economy, as they are at the heart of economic growth, providing 60% of private sector jobs and half of private sector turnover.

The majority that are in contact with Ingenious Britain work incredibly hard to build and sustain their businesses and rather cheap little throwaway headlines like this do nothing to support them in this tentative recovery phase.

The survey also claimed that the average annual holiday taken by UK entrepreneurs was 21.4 days per year, the highest apart from Germany.

We don’t quite understand the notion that taking time off is a bad thing. We know that time off to recharge your batteries provides vital thinking time about your business and its direction, enhances your productivity on return and that most small business owners continue to work even when they have taken physical holiday away from the business.

So for those of you who are putting in the hours, day in day out, to create sustainable businesses that will contribute to economic growth, our message is this. Ignore the surveys – we’re behind you.

Article taken from Ingenious Britain.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ingenious Britain .