News

June 2017 – Keep it simple stupid

‘Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to make something simple’ Richard Branson.

The longer I spend running businesses, both for myself and for clients, unravelling complex family structures, mediating in family disputes, helping to improve the profi tability of small and medium sized businesses, the simpler I like things to be.

May 2017 – Slow learners

What would you do if you found a contractor instructed by a utility working on your land without prior agreement? Assume they have a statutory right to be there and let them carry on, or take issue and confront them? This sort of occurrence happens far too often.

April 2017 – Battles on the village green

Those of us managing private rural estates will most likely have a small fi eld or patch of land in the village that is owned by the estate but also used by the local community, maybe due to a footpath that crosses it, or if it forms what is viewed by many as the ‘village green’.

March 2017 – One eye on the detail

While we gaze thoughtfully in to the future anticipating the opportunities and pitfalls that Brexit might throw our way it would appear that those in government, and more particularly in Defra, are not doing the same. No surprise there I hear you say?

Cover Crops Guide

Please click on the link below to open the NIAB Cover Crops Guide.

Growth Programme – February 2017

Speaking at the Oxford Farming Conference, Andrea Leadsom announced that £120 million of funding will be made available to support farmers, grow businesses, and generate jobs in rural communities. This money is part of the Growth Programme distributed by the Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs).

Some have all the luck! – January 2017

Even if we didn’t say it out loud a few of us might have recently mused “I hope next year is going to be better than the last!”

Bakers don’t grow wheat – January 2017

Only a few years ago producing grapes and making wine was reserved to a few, nonconforming and often well healed eccentrics!  But over the last decade there has been something of a revolution in the English wine sector. No longer is the ownership of a vineyard exclusive to those who mastered what, to some, appeared to be a dark art.

Identifying Fact from Opinion – December 2016

My son’s homework had me stumped this week.  (No surprise there I hear you cry!). In my defence I’m usually called in for projects like making a model of the London eye, or a cardboard bike, or a life size digestive system (his teacher’s ability to test the practical skills of parents apparently know no bounds).

Grasping the nettle – November 2016

Often the largest single cost to a business is the people employed within it, and yet the largest common single limiting factor to a business are the people employed within it. No business is perfect, and yet one of the recurring issues we find when approaching a new business to advise (happily a regular occurrence) is that unhappily a lot of the real or perceived issues relate to the people already within it.