Benefits, self-emplyment, "gainful employment" and "minimum income floor"?

nannytone_2

aside from the benefits issue ...
has your kitchen been inspected by the local authority and been certified for use as a commercial unit?
you can get hefty fines for failing to comply with food hygene/safety standards

Naf

shegirl wrote: »

Things like being organised and structured. Advertising and marketing properly, not half arsed or stupidly, operating on a commercial basis, having the expectation of payment, having a business and or marketing plan (mine are separate) etc etc

Has she made proper plans? Business, marketing etc? Aside from leaflet drops, what is she doing?

She posts fairly frequently on FaceBook - certainly she's adding photos of every decent order we're getting. She's posting offers and competitions, and getting those onto local selling pages.
I've taken samples and leaflets around my Uni campus, and we got a good order of the back of that, who will be ordering again. In freshers' week I'll be doing it again, as I think that's the best time to get offers out.
We'll also be contacting all of the university societies with offers for their events.
We're always looking for tabletop sales & fairs to get a table and sell from.
We're putting offers and referral cards into every order we send out.
I have a list of other things we want to implement; although nothing is written up into a 'plan' as such.

shegirl wrote: »

Building a business is hard work and getting your name out there is the hardest part, you put hours into it,many hours.

Yeah, we know its slow going, but we are getting referrals, so that's good. Also getting more & more people who are totally unconnected to either of us interacting with the FaceBook page.

shegirl wrote: »

A cake business can be particularly hard right now, with so many stay at home mums turning their hands to it over the past few years. As it also going to be local only that can make it harder. Have you checked out the local competition on Facebook etc? An idea I saw someone with the other day was to offer coffee and cake drops to local businesses for lunch breaks. Maybe this would be worth looking into?

She's actually friends with a couple of local people who are quite well established. One of them particularly is offering loads of help & advice, as well as offering to order stuff from her supplier to help us get it cheaper.

shegirl wrote: »

She will also find it invaluable to have a facebook page, but on the downside all the hobby people have them too, you need to differentiate yourself as the wheat from the chaff and work on it regularly. Social media may be used by everyone (which is helpful in one respect) but there are an awful lot of 'mum businesses' - the term for awful hobby rubbish. Use it appropriately and stand out from the rest. Social media can be great for many things, and I'm on a high today due to it, I'm a jewellery designer and silversmith and am now being followed by TV presenters, fashion/style editors and have had a request to write a guest blog post for a website today, from a complete stranger

Go you! That's ace! We're trying not to just do the same old same old stuff that everyone has. She's very picky about making sure that everything looks good, and I'm always keen to do even fairly typical things in less common ways.

shegirl wrote: »

You shouldn't be looking at whether it looks like it'll pass WTC scrutiny now and giving up if it doesn't. You should be thinking 'how do we make this work? How am I going to achieve what I want? How do I build this business?'

I'm just they type that likes to be well prepared. I don't want to think we're doing well, only to get caught out and end up in a right mess.

blondebubbles wrote: »

Excuse me for trying to help. Seems to be clear English to me.

Sorry, I didn't mean to come across ungrateful . Its just that I'm trying to find out more specifically what they look for; most of what's in there is kinda vague and non-specific.

Naf

nannytone wrote: »

aside from the benefits issue ...
has your kitchen been inspected by the local authority and been certified for use as a commercial unit?
you can get hefty fines for failing to comply with food hygene/safety standards

We're fully registered. They weren't interested in physically visiting just yet (low risk operation, apparently), but we had a load of forms & stuff to go through. They're satisfied and we have the go ahead to trade.

shegirl

Naf wrote: »

She posts fairly frequently on FaceBook - certainly she's adding photos of every decent order we're getting. She's posting offers and competitions, and getting those onto local selling pages.
I've taken samples and leaflets around my Uni campus, and we got a good order of the back of that, who will be ordering again. In freshers' week I'll be doing it again, as I think that's the best time to get offers out.
We'll also be contacting all of the university societies with offers for their events.
We're always looking for tabletop sales & fairs to get a table and sell from.
We're putting offers and referral cards into every order we send out.
I have a list of other things we want to implement; although nothing is written up into a 'plan' as such.




Yeah, we know its slow going, but we are getting referrals, so that's good. Also getting more & more people who are totally unconnected to either of us interacting with the FaceBook page.




She's actually friends with a couple of local people who are quite well established. One of them particularly is offering loads of help & advice, as well as offering to order stuff from her supplier to help us get it cheaper.



Go you! That's ace! We're trying not to just do the same old same old stuff that everyone has. She's very picky about making sure that everything looks good, and I'm always keen to do even fairly typical things in less common ways.




I'm just they type that likes to be well prepared. I don't want to think we're doing well, only to get caught out and end up in a right mess.




Sorry, I didn't mean to come across ungrateful . Its just that I'm trying to find out more specifically what they look for; most of what's in there is kinda vague and non-specific.

Make a plan and keep a record of all the hours put in then, WTC can request these along with copies of adverts etc. I know of someone who does massages (not the naughty kind!) who had to send everything off recently. Keep all receipts/invoices. Make sure you have them.

You can do Facebook or you can really do Facebook. Promote as much as you can and allow people to connect with you rather than just see pictures all the time. Facebook reach is determined by various things and the quality of what is on the page is included in that. Look into social media marketing tips,to do it properly and most effectively it's really not a case of just put a few pics up of orders now and again-you need text,you need quality text and you need to create proper interaction otherwise your reach will be limited and people will forget you are there.

As for the other cake maker offering help,I would personally be wary. Yes,she may be offering to order bits for your wife but you can bet your life she is doing so so she can gain a profit from those items herself Why else would she be 'helping' a competitor? Because that's what your wife is,she's in competition with this other cake maker, you don't work along with them and promote each other,who would do that? She may offer advice,which is all well and good, just make sure you get the upper hand and run properly.

Locate decent suppliers yourself. It will save you money. Remember that bad bead stringer I mentioned earlier? She buys all her bits from Hobbycraft. Massive fail right there!

Also,make sure you have a proper pricing structure so your wife doesn't sell herself short and stands a chance of actually earning something for all the time she puts in. You can't succeed if you don't price properly, wants the point in working for a pittance?

FBaby

There's a lot of 'WE' in there. Is it her business or your joint business? Because the hours she declares to spend on her business need to be hers, not hers and yours.

Naf

shegirl wrote: »

Make a plan and keep a record of all the hours put in then, WTC can request these along with copies of adverts etc. I know of someone who does massages (not the naughty kind!) who had to send everything off recently. Keep all receipts/invoices. Make sure you have them.

Hmmmm, I hadn't thought about actual timesheets. I figured they know people can (and very probably do) just make them up, so wouldn't bother with them. Receipts etc. are a given; I've got a tracker spreadsheet, and nothing goes on it without the receipt going in the folder.

shegirl wrote: »

You can do Facebook or you can really do Facebook. Promote as much as you can and allow people to connect with you rather than just see pictures all the time. Facebook reach is determined by various things and the quality of what is on the page is included in that. Look into social media marketing tips,to do it properly and most effectively it's really not a case of just put a few pics up of orders now and again-you need text,you need quality text and you need to create proper interaction otherwise your reach will be limited and people will forget you are there.

We're trying. All the pictures are accompanied by text; we're trying different things, products, offers etc.

shegirl wrote: »

As for the other cake maker offering help,I would personally be wary. Yes,she may be offering to order bits for your wife but you can bet your life she is doing so so she can gain a profit from those items herself Why else would she be 'helping' a competitor? Because that's what your wife is,she's in competition with this other cake maker, you don't work along with them and promote each other,who would do that? She may offer advice,which is all well and good, just make sure you get the upper hand and run properly.

The prices she's offering, even if she's making something on them, are cheaper than we've found just now. She buys in bulk quantities that we just can't manage or justify right now, so I imagine that has something to do with it. But obviously we're not expecting referrals :rotfl:

shegirl wrote: »

Locate decent suppliers yourself. It will save you money. Remember that bad bead stringer I mentioned earlier? She buys all her bits from Hobbycraft. Massive fail right there!

Other than just Googling, how can we find suppliers?

shegirl wrote: »

Also,make sure you have a proper pricing structure so your wife doesn't sell herself short and stands a chance of actually earning something for all the time she puts in. You can't succeed if you don't price properly, wants the point in working for a pittance?

Yes, we recently learned that some of our prices were poorly calculated. Made a cake that took about 5 hours for £3 profit. Oops :T. Got another spreadsheet for that one too.

SkyeKnight

Naf wrote: »

How do they decide if this is the case or not?
We fully expect that this will be a viable, profitable business... eventually. She has even higher hopes of actually getting business premises eventually and actually opening a shop. I'm not sure that's likely; but its not outside the realms of possibility.
Right now, I just don't want to be caught out. While we're happy to do a bit more work in order to make sure we earn whatever minimum we have to; I'd like to be able to spot early if its actually not going to meet whatever requirements we need to continue receiving the other benefits we need to be able to get by just now; and she'll have to look for actual work instead. Even though every calculation I do suggests she'll effectively end up working for 50p an hour at best in the end.

Whilst the rules might be vague defining a profitable, viable business, there is absolutely no-way, never, ever, never that 50p an hour will qualify. Not under UC or for WTC. I think it is safe to say that earnings of around minimum wage would be acceptable (less in the first year when getting going). There is an enormous gulf between 50p an hour and minimum wage.

Icequeen99

SkyeKnight wrote: »

Whilst the rules might be vague defining a profitable, viable business, there is absolutely no-way, never, ever, never that 50p an hour will qualify. Not under UC or for WTC. I think it is safe to say that earnings of around minimum wage would be acceptable (less in the first year when getting going). There is an enormous gulf between 50p an hour and minimum wage.

It would under WTC - you only need to show there is a view to realisation of profit - not a certain level of profit and that it is commercial which could be fulfilled even if you were only making 50p.

IQ

Naf

SkyeKnight wrote: »

Whilst the rules might be vague defining a profitable, viable business, there is absolutely no-way, never, ever, never that 50p an hour will qualify. Not under UC or for WTC. I think it is safe to say that earnings of around minimum wage would be acceptable (less in the first year when getting going). There is an enormous gulf between 50p an hour and minimum wage.

That 50p an hour is what she'd be working for if she had to find an actual job paying her minimum wage. Once you consider childcare costs for three kids and everything else we'd pay extra. Its not really an easy figure to calculate tbh, that's just one figure I came to; but the simple fact is that finding an employer able & willing to give school-friendly hours is difficult to start with, and the greatest likelihood is that she'd be forced into working out-of-school hours and we'd be paying childcare, travel etc.
At the end of the day we could get really lucky; or she could end up with no choice but to take a job an hour's travel away, who aren't prepared to be at all flexible - and that'd make a right mess of my studies too. So we'd much prefer to get this working and successfully bringing in some money.

Am I right in thinking that the Universal Credit criteria is that you need to make profits equal to NMW for whatever the minimum number of hours you'd be expected to work in a week are? Because if that's the criteria, then most actual jobs don't meet it.

Icequeen99

Naf wrote: »

That 50p an hour is what she'd be working for if she had to find an actual job paying her minimum wage. Once you consider childcare costs for three kids and everything else we'd pay extra. Its not really an easy figure to calculate tbh, that's just one figure I came to; but the simple fact is that finding an employer able & willing to give school-friendly hours is difficult to start with, and the greatest likelihood is that she'd be forced into working out-of-school hours and we'd be paying childcare, travel etc.
At the end of the day we could get really lucky; or she could end up with no choice but to take a job an hour's travel away, who aren't prepared to be at all flexible - and that'd make a right mess of my studies too. So we'd much prefer to get this working and successfully bringing in some money.

Am I right in thinking that the Universal Credit criteria is that you need to make profits equal to NMW for whatever the minimum number of hours you'd be expected to work in a week are? Because if that's the criteria, then most actual jobs don't meet it.

Yes that is the UC criteria. Outside of the start-up period, self-employed claimants will need to earn hours x NMW as profit. The rules are slightly different for couples as it depends on what the other person is earning.

All employed jobs meet it - they have to pay NMW (aside from apprenticeships and similar things)

IQ