Blog entries by Ozzy
John Healey gave his first big speech as chancellor this morning, standing in front of a row of industrial robots at the Manufacturing Technology Centre in Coventry, with manufacturing apprentices sat in the front row. It was a good backdrop, well chosen. While he was speaking, Jaguar Land...
If you run a business in Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds or Bristol, you were probably told some good news this week.
The Times reported on Wednesday that as many as 90,000 London roles in banking, law and accountancy are forecast to move out of the capital over the next five years, taking a £9...
On 5 August, @Data Swami posted in the General Business Forum with a question that ought to have a short answer.
He had spent six months building out an AI agent setup for his own business, working through the errors, the wasted usage and the blind alleys until it did what he needed. People had...
Companies House published a release on August 6th 2026 that every company director should read, even those who think none of it applies to them.
The headline is this: 23 company directors were disqualified in the first six months of 2026 for persistent or serious non-compliance with their...
If all goes to plan (or rather, to Labour's timetable), Andy Burnham will be sworn in as Prime Minister on 20 July. He is currently the only declared candidate to succeed Keir Starmer, having returned to Westminster after winning the Makerfield by-election last month. Barring a late challenger...
TL;DR
Search has shifted from "ten blue links" to answer engines, and the click is dying: Google AI Overviews now cut organic click-through rates by around 58% for the top result (Ahrefs, December 2025), the UK has the highest zero-click rate of any country analysed — only 23.2% of total...
There's a comforting myth that you need a booming economy to start something. Cheap money, confident customers, the wind at your back. It feels true. It mostly isn't.
Some of the most durable companies we know were started in the teeth of a downturn — when money was tight, the headlines were...
There's a question that a lot of small business owners never think to ask until they absolutely have to: if I wanted to sell this business tomorrow, could I?
For many, the answer is more complicated than they'd expect. Not because the business isn't profitable, not because it lacks customers...
Every small business owner knows the moment. You're halfway through something important when a team member appears at your shoulder with a question you've answered before. Not once. Several times. You answer it again, they thank you, and you both carry on. A week later, it happens again.
It's...
If you sell physical products online, you already know the feeling. You check your inbox, and there it is: another "delivered but not received" claim. Or a damage report. Or a courier compensation request that will take three hours of back-and-forth to recover £12.
At a certain point, most...
Somewhere between the headlines promising AI will transform everything and the frustrated forum posts from people who've been let down by it, there's a more useful conversation to be had. Not "is AI good or bad?" but "what do you actually need to know before you start — or before you go...
It started with a comment about music.
@JEREMY HAWKE , a courier business owner from Exeter and long-standing UKBF member, mentioned in passing that he'd been listening to something he enjoyed this week — only for his granddaughter to point out it was AI-generated. A small moment, easily...
Every few months on UK Business Forums, a thread appears that refuses to die. The "AI does have its uses" discussion — started back in February by long-standing moderator @fisicx — has now passed 112 replies. That doesn't happen by accident. It happens when a topic is genuinely unresolved, when...
A thread appeared on UKBF this week that, on the surface, looks like a straightforward complaint about eBay. Look a little closer though, and it's actually a window into one of the most underappreciated risks facing small business owners right now.
@paulears , a long-standing member of this...
Three articles into a series on what crowdfunding actually costs, the practical question remains. If you are running a UK business in 2026 and considering a community-led raise, what should you do? A framework, grounded in the one major UK case that has gone differently from BrewDog and Star...
How three letters from the early years of Star Citizen's development quietly set the governance structure of a business that is still, thirteen years later, being governed by them. And what that tells UK founders about the part of crowdfunding the prospectus never mentions.
On or around 1...
Why BrewDog's Equity for Punks investors were structurally locked out of the upside long before the administration happened, and what any founder running a values-led raise in 2026 should learn from it.
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For most readers, the BrewDog story ended on 2 March 2026. For the Equity for Punks...
What BrewDog's collapse and Star Citizen's billion-dollar climb are telling UK founders about the true cost of crowdfunded capital
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On Monday 2nd March 2026, BrewDog went into administration. The brewery and eleven of its bars were sold to US cannabis-and-beverage firm Tilray for £33...