The Microbusinesses You Don't See: Are Home-Based Businesses Falling Through the Gaps?

When we talk about supporting small businesses, who are we actually talking about?

Welcome to the Serene Creations blog,

This month's blog post was inspired by an interview on ITV's This Morning, where Prime Minister Andy Burnham discussed rebuilding trust and his plans to visit pubs and businesses across the UK this August.

Getting out into communities, talking to business owners and seeing what life is really like on the ground can only be a good thing. We understand why pubs, shops and other high-street businesses are an obvious place to start. They are visible parts of our communities, and when you walk down a high street, you can quite literally see the businesses operating there.

But it got us thinking about the businesses you don't see.

The person working from a spare bedroom. The person packing orders at their kitchen table. The parent trying to build something around childcare. The person who can't access traditional employment and is trying to create their own route into work. The tiny business that might make £50 one month, only to put all of it straight back into stock, packaging, insurance, advertising or market fees.

These businesses might not have a shopfront, employees or a large turnover, but that doesn't mean they aren't businesses. So where do they fit when the Government talks about small-business support and economic growth?

When You're Somewhere in Between

There is support out there for businesses, and we've seen some of it ourselves. Programmes such as The King's Trust Enterprise programme can help young people develop a business, while schemes such as Start Up Loans can provide finance and support to people looking to grow a business.

These are valuable opportunities, but what happens when you fall somewhere in between?

Perhaps you're outside the age criteria for certain youth enterprise support. Perhaps taking on business debt isn't realistic. Or perhaps your business is actively trading, but it's currently making so little money that borrowing thousands of pounds simply doesn't make financial sense.

You can end up in a strange position where you are too old for some support, too small for other support, and too financially vulnerable to take on debt.

And that is the gap we're talking about.

For many home-based businesses, building something locally involves a huge amount of work that isn't necessarily visible to anyone else. There are websites to maintain, social media accounts to manage, markets and events to attend, advertising to think about, and countless hours spent trying to make sure people actually know that the business exists. There is no shop window for someone to walk past. There isn't a sign above the door. 

So if nobody knows you're there, how can you benefit from an economy that's supposedly doing well?

What could actually be helpful for small businesses?

We'd love to see more politicians, local decision-makers and business organisations recognise what microbusiness actually looks like behind the scenes. Not just the shopfront, the café counter or the pub bar, but the laptop on the kitchen table, the boxes of stock in the spare room and the person spending their evening trying to work out how to reach their next customer.

We'd love to see a Prime Minister or local MP sitting in someone's tiny home office, perhaps with a cat wandering past or a child running around in the background, just as much as we'd like to see them pulling a pint in a pub for the cameras.

Because this is also what running a small business in Britain can look like.

And perhaps that's where the conversation needs to start. We're asking whether the smallest businesses could have a little more recognition, visibility and practical support while they're finding their feet.

If the Government wants to support small businesses and understand what economic growth actually looks like across the country, it needs to acknowledge the businesses that aren't immediately visible too.

Because before the Government can properly support a group, it needs to acknowledge that group exists. And currently, we aren’t seeing that acknowledgement, and this is why this month’s blog post is dedicated to this topic. 

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See you again soon!