"I’m not your normal green campaigner. First and foremost I’m a businessman. I’m for practical incentives that help businesses survive.”

We’re not sure that’s the quote The Carbon Trust had in mind when it asked Dragon Theo Paphitis to support its campaign for companies to update their old equipment with greener, more efficient replacements.

Indeed, you sense this dragon’s ears probably didn’t prick attentively until the prospect of interest-free loans of up to £400,000 was thrown into the equation.

Result: one dragon who’s suddenly very much ‘in’: “It’s what I call a no-brainer – an open goal."    

By the look of it, it’s another shrewd decision.  The Carbon Trust’s ‘The Big Business Refit’, aimed at helping small and medium-sized businesses “cut costs, go green and be more profitable” seems to make perfect business sense.

The older your equipment is, the greater its appetite for energy, and the more of your money it’s wasting. By scrapping old equipment and updating to new energy efficient models, The Carbon Trust claims most businesses can save around £14,000 per year on energy bills. 

Here’s how it works:

1. You scour your business for that old power guzzling equipment and machinery – from core factory machinery, past-it boilers, clapped-out cranes, outdated ovens, or dusty old air-conditioning units.

2. An energy consultant will help you identify your ageing equipment and explain how to go about replacing it.

3. Get unsecured interest-free funding from the Carbon Trust for between £3,000 and £400,000.

4. Use that cash to get rid of your old, energy guzzling equipment, and machinery and switch to state-of-the art environmentally friendly models.

5. Watch your energy bills drop and your business efficiency rise thanks to your new kit. Pay the loan back from the savings you make, then pump the continuing savings back into the business.

Roberts Mart, a Yorkshire-based printer, has taken two Carbon Trust loans, totalling over £300,000 for new printing equipment and lighting, and now saves around £130,000 a year on energy bills.

The government has committed £100m of funding for the scheme on a first come, first served basis.

Companies must employ fewer than 250 people and typically use more than 6,000MWh of electricity (approximately £500,000's worth) each year.

For more info or to apply, call 01865 885879, or visit Carbon Trust Loans to find out more about your eligibility for a loan. You’ll get expert advice and all the details you need to apply for the interest free funding.

And, according to the site, you could have a cheque in less than two weeks!
 

While Smarta is happy to agree attempting to buy Lemsip from a Majorcan pharmacy using only exaggerated facial expressions and frantic gesticulation to communicate is no-one’s idea of a great holiday, we’re finding it difficult to sympathise with a European Courts of Justice (ECJ) ruling which gives workers the right to claim days back from their employer if they fall ill during their annual leave.

The judgement came after a Spanish worker who was injured shortly before he was due to take a month’s leave but wasn’t allowed to reschedule his holiday took his case to court, where judges ruled on his behalf.

Experts, though, have warned the new system could be open to manipulation by workers who just want to extend their annual leave. Katja Hall, director of policy at employers’ organisation the CBI, said it was causing concern among businesses.

“Many firms already take a common sense and sympathetic approach. But allowing employees to re-classify their holiday as sick leave opens the door to abuse,” she said.

Sophie Kummer, a spokesperson for the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB), added that it would have a particular effect on small businesses.

“We have to see how this plays out in England, but it could be an enormous blow to small businesses who don’t employ many people and whose employees then have to spend time catching up.

“Businesses could lose out on productivity.”
 

It’s your last chance to win a pair of tickets to tomorrow’s Glasshouse, the hottest entrepreneur networking and question-panel event in London. Just think of a great question for Spotify CEO Daniel Ek and send it over to us by 5:30 pm today for a chance of being there. We’ve got five pairs of tickets (worth £25 each) to give away for the best enquiries.

The event is being held at the Royal College of Physicians and kicks off at 7pm (September 17) and as always promises to be a networking goldmine rich with topical startup debate.

Email competitions@smarta.com with ‘Glasshouse question’ as the subject line. Or tweet @the_glasshouse with your question, including ‘Smarta comp’ in your tweet. Winners will be notified by tomorrow noon.

Good luck!
 

Nick Wheeler, founder of Charles Tyrwhitt, the London-based shirt manufactor and retailer, has ruled out floating the business.

The Telegraph reported last year that Wheeler was poised to float the £53m turnover compay on AIM.  A flotation failed to surface, leaving commentators to surmise it could be one of several prospective IPOs to be revived once market conditions recovered.

Wheeler now insists that won’t happen, though.

“I’ve always felt I would never float the business,” he said in an exclusive interview with Smarta.

“I was thinking about it but then The Telegraph did this story and it all got ahead of itself. It was something I was never really considering. When the story came out I realised this just wasn’t the right thing.”

“When I look at the people I respect in retail, such as Bernard Lewis at River Island, who’s a retail genius, they haven’t build their businesses to sell them and I think that’s my chosen route.

“I don’t think I will ever do it.”

Contrary to further speculation, Wheeler is also unlikely to turn to VC money to catalyse a roll-out of Charles Tyrwhitt stores – favouring organic growth instead.

“I have no plans to take institutional finance. We can open stores out of cashflow,” he confirmed. “Not having somebody on the outside telling us what to do, whose motives are invariably shorter term than ours, is extremely helpful. We don’t want to have outside investors telling us what to do.

“The only possible exception would be if we needed to increase the rate of expansion, but my preferred option would be to fund internally and grow more tortoise- than hare-like.”

Despite having New York stores at the foot of both Lehman and Bear Stearns, Wheeler reports sales are up and says any reluctance to take on investment is a personal choice, not a reflection of the economic climate.

“I started in a recession and I think that was a good thing. If you start in a boom time when people are throwing money at you, you and the business don’t learn the rigour needed to survive in tough times. We’re profligate. We always look after the pennies.”

“Unless people start going around stark naked they’re going to need shirts. Even if it starts getting tough, if you start walking around in frayed shirts people think you’re a bit of a loser. So I think, touch wood, we’re actually having a fantastic time.”

With nine UK stores and sites in New York, Madrid, Paris, Kuwait and Singapore and 80% of revenues coming from online, Wheeler is adament the recession presents more opportunities than challenges - citing its recent acquisition of prime, and until recently difficult to secure, retail space in Canary Wharf as evidence.

A full video interview with Nick Wheeler, detailing the growth of Charles Trywhitt and his tips for success, will be live on Smarta next week.

Entrepreneur Mike Clare, founder of Dreams Plc, the UK’s largest beds retailer, has hit out at the government for the bureaucratic burden faced by new businesses and urged opposition leader David Cameron to listen to the needs of start-up companies.

Clare, who’s started a number of new companies since selling a controlling stake in Dreams for a reported £200m in March 2008, claims he’s now witnessed first-hand the sheer weight of regulation new business owners have to contend with.

“People say 80% of new businesses fail in the first three years and most of that is dealing with the back end,” said Clare in an exclusive interview with Smarta.com.

“If you’re a florist you want to be focussed on blooms and roses not what you’ll actually spend half your time doing which is HR regulation, employment law, health and safety, tax returns – all this stuff which is nothing to do with flowers.

“You spend most of your time now dealing with bureaucracy - there’s too much.”

Clare argues a new system is needed where new and small companies are excluded from certain regulations in order for owners to focus on establishing and growing their businesses.

“There should be an amnesty on legislation for new businesses. They’d need to adhere to the critical laws obviously, but not all of them. Laws should be graded, A,B,C,D etc and new firms should only have to pay attention to the A laws.

“We don’t want anyone to be dangerous but some of it is completely unnecessary. It’s fine for big companies and laws need to be there – but they shouldn’t apply to all companies.”

Clare also called for a simplification of the tax system, claiming its complexity added to the onerous nature of company administration.

“Why do we have income tax and National Insurance? Is it jobs for the boys? Why is VAT 17.5%? Why not make it 20% and reduce income tax considerably? Why is everything so complicated? If you look at the VAT laws it’s massively complicated.

“I’m sure there’d be some winners and losers if it was simplified, but at least everyone would understand things and people would be concentrated on the front end of their business rather than worrying about the back end.”

And in a final blow to Gordon Brown and the Labour government, Clare quipped: “So David Cameron, if you’re listening, get on with it!”

A full video interview with Mike Clare, detailing the growth of Dreams and his tips for success, will be live on Smarta next week.
 

A new offline network is allowing entrepreneurs to share strategy advice and contacts with peers from different sectors.

The Entrepreneurs Board teams up 12 or so business owners once a month and promises ‘experiential learning gained from leaders talking to leaders’. It’s a branch-off of the Academy for Chief Executives, which has been running the same peer-to-peer learning model with success.

We were with the guys there last night as they announced a batch of new research. One in five people think peer groups are the best way of learning, the survey of 2,000 members of the public showed. And, encouragingly, it found four in ten people plan to run their own business in the future. 28% think entrepreneurs are going to have the most positive effect on the economy, compared with 24% who placed their faith instead in the government.

We wish the Entrepreneurs Board, supported by startup-specialist accountancy Smith & Williamson and media providers Fresh Business Thinking, the best of luck. Entrepreneurs do learn best from each other – that’s the whole ethos behind Smarta. So it’s great to see other groups facilitating this too.

If you’d like to become a member of the Entrepreneur’s Board, email david@entrepreneursboard.com or call 0870 228 3369. It’ll cost you £300 a month, which is a lot less than a non-executive director, as one of the Board’s founders pointed out last night. You may also qualify for a Train to Gain grant that’ll reduce that price.
 

There’s a postal strike on.

Smarta only mentions this because, well, it hasn’t really noticed much of an interruption to its service so far – except when its DVDs failed to arrive, but its suspects that has less to do with the postal strike and more to do with its postman’s taste for 1970s action thrillers.

That said, although the current strike seems to be a bit of a sad affair, if a vote by the Communication Workers’ Union (CWU), which is threatening national strike action unless the Royal Mail agrees to stop making redundancies, swings the wrong way when it happens later today, the UK could be hit by something altogether more impressive.

To get their sides of the arguments across, this morning’s Today programme featured proponents from both sides throwing various accusations at one another. “You’ve already agreed to redundancies,” moaned Royal Mail managing director Mark Higson, while CWU’s deputy general secretary Dave Ward repeated the words ‘no strike guarantee’ several times, before giving up and mumbling something about 'periods of calm'.

Smarta’s favourite character during this slot – this pantomime of malcontent, if you will – was Séan Rickard, a senior lecturer in business economics from Cranfield School of Management, who sounded as though the whole episode was causing him untold personal misery.

“This is a rather emotional dispute,” he lamented to a rather amused-sounding John Humphrys. “The Trade Unions know in their hearts this must involve redundancies, and the management needs to recognise this is a most difficult thing for a union to accept.”

Rickard’s diagnosis involved an issue every business experiences: communication. “There’s an air of adversarial relationships, a complete lack of trust between management and the unions,” he explained. "Both the management and the union must take responsibility for that."

You see? It all comes down to trust. Stay transparent, maintain a good relationship with your employees, and you too can avoid strike action on a national scale.

Next week: Smarta cures the NHS of its absence problem and makes HMRC's online self-assessment tax return system work first time, every time.

It came as something of a revelation to Smarta that Daniel Ek, co-founder of arguably the most successful web start-up to come out of Europe in the last five years, only discovered Twitter, aservice even Smarta’s mum has been subscribed to for the last six months, ‘a couple of months ago’.

“It’s great,” the Spotify entrepreneur enthused to an audience of slightly open-mouthed tech aficionados at a Glasshouse event last night, “because you can get feedback directly from your users. We used to look for problems but now they solve them for us. It gives you direct access to so many smart people.”

Clearly, while the rest of us have been Twittering away, Ek has been busy concentrating more important matters: while he was cagey about the precise number of users the music-streaming service has, he did confess the amount of work he had to put into building the service took him by surprise.

“We never anticipated that it would take two and a half years to get record labels to see the vision and come aboard,” he explained. “But we had to get the product right before we started licensing it, so there were times we had to push back the launch by six months to make sure it was perfect.”

There’s no doubt the amount of time the Spotify team put into perfecting the business model has paid off: Ek revealed while the percentage of users who pay a monthly subscription fee to use the service is ‘less than double figures’, since Spotify’s iPhone app launched last month, revenues have grown by 50% – and in Ek’s home country of Sweden, one in nine people are signed up to the service.

Ek made the point that if Spotify’s runaway success demonstrates one thing, it’s that the entertainment industry’s business model is dying on its feet. If the media industries are to survive, he explained, they are going to have to radically alter their models.

“The entertainment industry needs to do something soon,” he said. “People want to consume more content from a bigger variety of sources – but just selling stuff no longer works.”
 

What with the strains of economic recovery, a continued reluctance on behalf of banks to give credit and the threat of rising taxes, businesses could be forgiven for putting their hands over their ears and singing loudly in order to avoid noticing a new report which says they need to put more money into working with universities.

The report, published this morning by employers’ organisation the CBI, says if the UK wishes to maintain its international competitiveness, businesses need to put more money into higher education through sponsorships, financial support for graduates and work placements.

Richard Lambert, the group’s director general, says the measures are ‘vital’. “Business should engage more with universities, both financially and intellectually,” he trilled. “More firms should help design and pay for courses for the benefit of the current and future workforce, and more firms should offer students practical work experience.”

Smarta isn’t surprised by these suggestions. When Tony Blair announced in 1997 in what was denounced as ‘an almost throwaway statement’ he would personally ensure 50% of all 18-30-year-olds go into higher education, he was setting a course for chaos – an action which saw thousands of students signing up for degrees in football studies.

But instead of asking businesses to invest even more in travel and tourism courses, perhaps another solution might be found in apprenticeships, government funding of which has increased by a quarter in the last year alone.

Rather than force people who don’t enjoy it into higher education, allowing them to earn a subsidised wage while teaching them a skill they can use further down the line will allow them to spend the time they might otherwise invest in a parapsychology degree into something worthwhile.

“[We recommend that] the government temporarily drops its target of 50% of 18-30-year-olds participating in higher education,” said Lambert today. But how about going one better than that? How recognising some people just aren't suited to academia - and then abolishing the target altogether?

One of the questions Smarta often asks during its interviews with business owners is whether they think entrepreneurialism is nature or nurture – are entrepreneurs born or made?

Opinion over the matter has, until now, been steadfastly divided – while many believe there’s a genetic link, others, such as Coffee Republic founders Sahar and Bobby Hashemi whose book, ‘Anyone can do it’, claims to ‘blow apart the myth that only “special” people can start a business’, have made money teaching those who aren’t as entrepreneurially inclined how to run a successful business.

All that may be blown out of the water, though, after the results of a study into the business behaviour of more than 1,700 sets of twins has showed there is a link between genetics and whether you will run a business.

The investigation, by scientists Nicos Nicolaou and Scott Shane, looked into education, self-employment status, income and entrepreneurial attitudes, as well as the effect on chemical mechanisms in the brain which that increase the likelihood of self-employment and how genes which make some people more sensitive to environmental stimuli develop.

The pair claim to have created ‘the first empirical test’ to prove entrepreneurs are born, not made, but Smarta isn’t sure it’s so simple: the study is vague about defining an ‘entrepreneur’ and for most, good leadership skills or the ability to make books balance is far from a genetic predisposition.

Perhaps what is genetic about entrepreneurs, then, is less some mystical power and more the ability and drive to force yourself into learning new skills and honing those you already have.