Everyone I’ve spoken to in the last week has asked the same question: how can I get more done in the time I have?

Coincidentally, this is also a question I’ve been considering myself recently – odd you might think for the owner of a business that offers outsourcing and opportunities to take on some your workload! 

As with most small business owners I can work long hours, at weekends, and find myself snatching 5 or 10 minutes here and there around my family and other commitments.  With bigger demands on my business, I need to be more productive.

So I’ve spent some time evaluating how best to address this, and I thought I’d share my discoveries and look at how they could help you to be more productive:

The Business Greenhouse is pleased to launch a new champion of the smallest of small businesses on Monday 26th March: ‘MicroBusiness Monday’.

MicroBusiness Monday is a chance for owners of the smallest of businesses (those that employ up to 10 people) to celebrate their achievements, to share the challenges they face, and to find support amongst their peers. 

This is hugely important at a time when microbusinesses are generally feeling the pressure of a reduced demand for their products and services in this current economic climate. Yet, the government expects that they will play a significant role in helping to secure economic growth.  

Politics and small business make an interesting mix, as borne out by observations made on last nights BBC Question Time.

In an amusing discussion involving Justice Minister Ken Clarke MP, Baroness Kramer, Owen Jones (author of ‘Chavs’), John Prescott, and Julie Meyer, Founder of Ariadne Capital, the message regarding businesses is clearly ‘the more money we can get small businesses to borrow, the better the country’s chances of finding economic stability quickly’.

However, even if this is right strategy, the discussion showed it appears to be failing.

With the new year underway we wondered how many small businesses have set themselves new goals and ambitions for 2012, or have renewed their promise of pursuing new ideas made in the months, or even years, gone by.

When setting up The Business Greenhouse we surveyed businesses to find out what their ambitions were.  While the survey helped us to decide what services and support we should be delivering, we thought you might like to see the results.

Hurray, The Business Greenhouse's blog is finally up and running!  

A warm welcome to all of our readers.

With this blog we hope to share news from The Business Greenhouse, including things we're working on and discoveries we make - all of which we hope will be of interest to owners of micro/small businesses.

Rather aptly, our first discovery to share with you is Weebly.com!  Helpfully, Weebly themselves have given us a link that we can give to you so you can find them easily:  http://www.weebly.com/link/T0psbf

One of the reasons that it took us longer than we wanted to get our blog up and running was because we couldn't decide on what platform to use.  Was it to be blogger, Wordpress, Posterous, or one of the many of what seems like millions of blog providers out there.  We hadn't even heard of Weebly, until a chat with someone at our local University medical science department of all places mentioned that they were using it to set up a website.

So we took a look, saw how apparently easy to use it is with its drag and drop tool, and signed up that very day.  Oh, and it's FREE and our readers aren't going to be subjected to advertisements put there by Weebly.

So far, so good for our blog.  We just want something that will do the job for us and we don't need to fiddle around with to get it to work - although this is our very first post so hopefully all will continue as smoothly!

Do you blog? And if so, how do you find your blogging platform?  Any pro's and con's?

In the meantime, onwards and upwards for The Business Greenhouse!  We look forward to seeing how 2012 develops!