“You’re not a small business!” said someone on the internet, of course.
But yes, yes we are. By any definition you care to apply we are a small business. The UK government like to make things complicated and yes, our website looks like it might have been done by someone who knows something about that there internet thing and we hold a surprisingly large amount of stock these days, but look, we don’t meet any of the criteria for being large:
The UK tax people, HMRC, define an SME (small or medium size enterprise) as a business with not more than 500 employees and an annual turnover of less than £100 million.
The Department for Business defines SMEs as companies who employ less than 250 employees.
Companies House defines a small business as employing less than 50 people with a turnover of under £6.5 million and a medium business as less than 250 employees and a turnover under £25.9 million.
Just for a change, we also sometimes use the EU definition of an SME which goes:
Micro Business – less than 10 people employed and turnover under £2 million
Small Business – less than 50 people employed and turnover under £10 million
Medium Business – less than 250 people employed and turnover under £50 million
I can assure you that even if we counted as employees our person on a sandwich year in industry, a sales person paid on results, a one day a week press person, Chloe who gets the odd bit of work from me doing vines and blogs... even if I employed Morgana instead of her being self employed, and had an admin person rather than paying accountants and doing the rest between us...
WE ARE TINY
I’m just a right noisebox, is all.
And everyone involved is very committed and professional, at least when I’m not around being a bad influence on them. But we are some considerable way away from the turnover required to hit any of the next levels by any of those standards!
So small our social event last year was Rachel's wedding.
