Using Your Citizen’s Rights to the Fullest

Many people who harbour ambitions of getting into business don’t have the full measure of the rights afforded to them and so they go the long way around and just make things unnecessarily difficult for themselves. I can’t really blame you if that’s the case because I mean you have to get this information from somewhere — information which is not so easy to get from the original sources such as the various government departments in charge of overseeing the rules and regulations governing business practices.

Who do you go to for example if you want to find out about how to register as a Financial Services Provider and perhaps play in the big leagues of business such as running your own bank or your own insurance company? I can bet you £60,000 you won’t find all the information you need by just running a Google search!

By the way, £60,000 isn’t just any number I sucked out of my thumb — that’s how much you’ll need to get a business plan drawn up by the local branch of a world-famous accounting and auditing firm should you want to start your own insurance company. That’s just part of the process however because what you’ll also need is about £1,100,000 in cash which will be held in reserve “to protect your customers” against your insurance company possibly going under.

Anyway, this isn’t a post about starting your own insurance company or financial services firm — I just shared this information to make the point that the important information you really need as a businessperson is never just handed to you on a silver platter, neither is the enforcement of your citizen’s rights. If somebody decides to sue your company for example, you need to fork out some money to pay a legal professional to help you defend the company, even if you know you’ve not done anything wrong.

In that regard your best bet would be to sign up to those legal services which specifically cater to companies and business owners, offering legal coverage of sorts which you can access at a reasonable monthly fee instead of having to scramble around for a lawyer when faced with a legal challenge. Beyond the legal spheres however it’s all about making inquiries — you have to take it upon yourself to ask some specific questions to which you want specific answers and sometimes it might require you to be a bit more persistent and perhaps even a little forceful.

For instance, did you know that you could be entitled to a monetary grant from the government by mere virtue of the fact that you’re trying to get a business off the ground? It is the right of every citizen in the UK, but most people don’t know this because they cave-in too quickly to the generally quizzical manner in which public sector officials dealing with such processes interact with them.

It’s as simple as this — the guy or gal stationed at the front-office of what was previously known as the Department of Trade and Industry is not there to make friends with you — they’re there to do the job of processing whatever applications you need to make in order to get what’s due to you, so if they don’t do their job properly, report them to the appropriate authorities and even involve some legal aid if you have to. These are your rights and you should use them to the fullest if you want to realise any success in your business endeavours.