About us

We’re a not-for-profit organisation set up by the government to support SMEs. This site is dedicated to helping small businesses make better use of technology to drive improvements in performance

Who are we?

Be the Business was launched in November 2017 with funding and support from the UK government and some of Britain’s leading companies. We work with the entire business community to share what works for today’s best businesses with every company that wants to learn and improve. We’re here to help every firm in the country improve their own performance, and the performance of those they work with.

We’re pro-technology, because we know how powerful it can be. Implemented well it can be a tremendously powerful tool to improve your business. Unfortunately, there are lots of businesses in the UK who either aren't using technology or aren't getting the most out of it. We built this website to help them.We’ll share stories of failures as well as successes, so we can learn from what can go wrong as well as what works.

Read about our other work on our main site

Visit the Be the Business website

Why technology?

Used well, technology can allow firms to grow more scalably, to increase the returns they can generate on the same cost base, or to generate the same returns while reducing cost.

Problem is, the UK lags behind many other economies when it comes to how many of our firms are using these technologies. This is a major driver of the so-called ‘productivity puzzle’, making us less competitive, less prosperous, and preventing wage growth. Even in firms that are making the choice to use technology, too many of them are failing to implement successfully and so are failing to extract the full benefits that technology can bring.

This site is intended to help address this problem, providing business leaders with independent, trustworthy advice and resources developed from conversations with their peers.

Learn about the software you could use

Take a look at our technology explainers
Read the guides

Is it really free?

Yes, completely. All the information on this site and all the resources you can download are free. We’re not selling anything. We’re not in cahoots with vendors. We just want to help. This site and its content is supported by government funding and our only objective is to provide the best support to businesses that we can.

You can download our free step by step guide to introducing new technology in your business here

Our adoption and implementation guide

How has this content been developed?

All the content on this site has been developed from conversations that we’ve had with business leaders. We have spent months gathering as many stories of technology adoption as we could, going across the country and speaking to firms of different sizes and in different sectors about how they have used technology, the challenges they have faced, and how they have overcome them. We hope that these stories, and the resources we’ve pulled together based on them, can inspire more UK firms to adopt these technologies, and support those that do so they can have even greater success.