CV19 Update – 24th March

Last updated: 24 March 2020

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1:34 80% Subsidy
5:00 Loan Guarantee
8:00 Statutory Sick Pay
13:45 Micro Ltd Co
15:00 VAT payments
16:00 Hotels, Hospitality
17:00 Grants
18:00 Free Course

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Hello and welcome. Today's the 24th it is lunchtime and I'm here to give you an update and answer some questions that I've had recently. I'm going to go through it through it in a more structured way. Today, I'm going to give you the progress on different areas. And which I'm going to now do every day.

And in between that, I'm just going to lighten up a bit with some business advice. Okay. So the first thing I want to just, uh, have understood is we're in tough times. The prime minister introduced lockdown yesterday. It still amazes me that so many people ignore the advice to self isolate in wanting to spit a spread the disease.

Killing more people, hurting more of the NHS teams. But nevertheless, those of you who are watching me, I'm sure are more sensible than that. If you don't think, uh, what I believe is right, please stop watching. Cause I believe self isolation is the responsible thing to do. If you don't agree with me, you probably don't want to be in anything I say because I'm full of that.

Okay? So it's tough times really, really tough times, but. It will end. Right? There's one thing for sure. This will end. Like everything else that's ever happened, that's bad. We will overcome it. And as business owners, we have a responsibility to society to be at the forefront, to be the leader of that. Okay.

So. It will end. And all clients or teams, all our communities need us to show leadership. So let's start with the first piece, which is a job protect the job protection scheme. Uh, we announced, um, on Friday thing that, Oh, the Arushi Arushi soonish announced the chancellor announced 80% support. Brilliant, brilliant support for employee ears.

Now that covers about, um. 18 million out of the 25 million a working population, he still hasn't announced. Um, the needing for the 7 million will come and go against that next. But remember, if your employer is asking you to follow, then what you need to do is make sure you're not working at all. You stay at home and you go on garden leave.

You can't work for anyone else. And, uh, you all been available for work whenever he calls you back. For the time you all followed, the government will subsidize your salary by 80% making it easier for your employer to really, uh, hold on to you and try to keep your job open so that when things pick up again, which they will.

That you will be ready and willing to jump back in and get stuck into offer. Great service to your customers and clients, which I'm sure you do. So the 80% is limited to 22,400 per year. If your salary is 2000 sorry, 2,500 per month. If your salary is 2,500 per month or more, the limit is going to be 80% of 2000.

500 if it's less than 2,500 per month, you will get 80% of whatever your salary is. If your gross salary is 2000 pounds a month, you will get 80% of 2000 pounds. If your salary is 10,000 pounds per month, you will get 80% of 2,500 per month. Now the employee will have to pay it out and then claim it back so.

This is why when we come to loans, this is one reason why a loan is a good idea. Because you're keeping your employees and you're protecting jobs. You're protecting the economy for when all this nonsense ends. You know, nonsense being a word for something that we can't control independently. You know, we need the scientists to help find, find a, uh, a method to stop this virus spreading and to cure it when people get it.

But you know, it is disruptive and we live in disruptive times. So in the meantime, if you can't, if you, you know, our businesses are our people and our clients, we've got to look at protecting both and communicating with them and looking off to them as best as we can is going to be paramount. So the next thing I want to just think of them as, I was going to lighten it up a bit in between.

I want to know that, uh, this will not last forever, right? We know that this will end at some point. It may end in 12 weeks. It may end in six months. It may end in. 12 months. We don't know. Right. These are things we haven't got control of. Cause it's a very new um, virus and its, and its effect is unknown and we don't know when we're going to get an antibody for it, an antivirus for it.

So right now we've got to be prepared. And, and in business you could be. Prepared for the worst and then work towards the best. Okay. And this is what I'm all about is, is like, listen, understand, and accept that the worst could happen. And if it does, now we need to prepare to take action. And that's where you, one of the things we proposed.

The next thing is the business interruption loan. The business interruption loan is a, a new suggest, a change of an existing loan. Where if as long as your viable announcements from the big banks and said, as long as your business is viable and if it was viable last year. They're assuming it's going to be viable next year.

They're willing to lend anything over 25,000 this is ball plays away where I bank anything over 25,000 they will land and it'll be guaranteed by the government. 80% and there's various limits. We'll talk about that in more detail in visually. When a, when that information is, is, is out there, but right now the banks have written to their customers saying, you know, we have these loans available.

As long as they lost. Now, when they say, as long as they lost, which you soon, I keep forgetting his name, the chancellor has said that, uh, he will make more money available when it's done in more money. He will do whatever it takes. So let's take him at his word and let's assume more money will come when the current trench of X billion of have gone.

So that's a business interruption loan. That's what's happening on that. There is stuff now feeding out that. Right. So last week it wasn't available. This week it is, makes them want to talk about is marketing, marketing and business is now more important than it's ever been. Right? It's an opportunity now to get our businesses really things we don't know me have time for.

If we're now furloughed or we're working from home, it's time for us business owners to begin to think you use, you know, use all this stuff. We've got up here to think about how we can position our business best for when we come out of it. Okay. We will come out of it now what the world will be like when we come out of it.

We don't really know. We know things will have changed when you, something shuts down. When the Holy economies of grinds, the whole, we're all in self isolation. We're all doing very little or nothing. You know, I'm here working from home. In my, in my study and, uh, you know, there's a whole lot of people who are just sitting there doing nothing because they don't, nothing to do.

Now is the best time to turn off Netflix, turn off the news, turn off social media and stop planning your marketing activities. How will, how will you communicate now with your customers? How will you communicate with your staff? How will you position yourself differently so that when the new world order arrives.

12 weeks old, 12 months. It doesn't, we don't know when, but when it does, we'll be ready and we'll have set the ground. We've got to set the foundations, and now we live such busy lives normally. But right now, what I'm gathering, a lot of my clients are at home, not doing very much. And so as a result, now is the brilliant time to start laying the foundations.

You know, making sure our clients feel loved and feel and feel valued. So, um. And that is really important. Okay, so that's marketing. Let's now talk about Saturday sickbay whether it's an employee of a business is entitled statuary, sick pay, but also if you're a freelancer or know self employed person, the government has said that you will be entitled to statutory sick pay.

And the old days of having to wait four days is no longer there. You can claim it from day one if you're self isolating like one of my daughters is, or whether you're, you know, you're real and you've got to take a couple of weeks off of sick leave. The government has said they're going to waive the first four days of that.

Not that you wouldn't normally get paid. You're going to get paid from day one. So remember, if you are a director, if you are an employee, remember to tell your employer to just make sure you claim your SSP fads, right? That you should claim it. If it's due to you and if you're self employed, you should get that.

Okay. So the next thing I want to talk about is, you know, every time I have one of these things, I'm going to have a break on talking about something business. Just to lighten it up a bit is you've got to be aware of how you feed your mind, what you feed your mind. I have trained myself over. 40 years of doing a huge amount of travel, spent a fortune in specific education.

I spent a lot of money in formal education, just probably useless to me largely. But, um, I've spent a lot of money, much, much more money on specific education, which gets me a result. 10 times false, you know, condenses 10 years into 10 days. And that's the sort of education I think is really important and available now.

You know, universities and stuff. Yeah, it's okay. But you know, you can get all that information much quicker. So be careful what you feed your mind. Are you going to feed your mind with Netflix? Uh, or, you know, Facebook and misinformation while you're going to feed your mind from, uh, you know, things like Ted talks on YouTube, or you're going to feed your mind from, from courses or, or business development information or marketing information or business or business structuring or getting yourself ready for your numbers, getting, you know, if you've never been good with numbers, now is a great time to start getting ready to understand your numbers so that when this all kicks off again.

If you use the free time, the available time to skill yourself up and understanding how your business works so you can really manage it right? This one, no one could have predicted the effect of this. There is no business on the planet. I think there was prepared for something like this. You know, we were so prepared for internet ashore, cutoffs, electricity, Chicago, burglary fires.

But this is something completely different. And so. John's is that we weren't prepared for that, which is fair enough. But the quicker we move low, you know, we were a virtual film already. We were already ready to go. And if you're not a virtual firm, you need some help in going virtual to communicate with your clients and your team.

Talk to us. We have a lot of knowhow. We've been doing this for seven, eight years now, and so we can help you with that. Okay. So feed your mind. So next thing is what's available for self employed. And you know, if you're a self employed or a partner or, um, and we'll talking about freelances in a second, but if you're self employed like a plumber or carpenter or you're, you've got a partnership like a solicitor or accountant, um, or, uh, other lava type of partnership, even if the limited liability partnership.

Then you will be, uh, available to claim statutory sick pay like everyone else. But also the government has talked about how they're going to help a self employed people. In this time of crisis, it's much more difficult because they haven't got a payroll and it's not a contract of employment. They live by their wits or self employed.

People don't wait. We don't work. We don't earn. If we don't provide value, we don't earn. And so. For the government is much harder to do to identify what's a fair amount to give us. It's probably going to be limited. To again, the 2,500 per month and 80% of that, I suspect, subject to how much you've earned in the last couple of years.

So if you've learned, this is my guest, by the way, there's actually nothing being announced. It may be announced today of four or five o'clock, six o'clock, whatever time we have all our a daily briefing from the governments, or it may be another day. It's a much more complicated problem than, um. Then the employee's situation where you can just say to employees, we're going to give you this money, right?

So just bear in mind that that is, um, that has a problem. So the next thing I want to talk about is, um, making progress or making excuses. The two, all mutually exclusive you get on to make progress in your business, in your life. If you're, if you're watching this, you're going to be a business almost certainly, because that's who I'm talking to.

But if you are. Um, in business, you know that you can either make progress or you can make excuses. If you make excuses, you're probably not going to make progress. That's probably the way things work in my, in my world, in my understanding, from experience of working for over a thousand businesses over, over my career, and certainly in my business, right?

Uh, there was a time I'll go, well, it's the economy's, the competition is this, is this. Now I just go, look, I've got it. It's me that's going to do something different. It's made, it's going to produce the extra value. It's me that's going to go and get the clients and sort of the Murley brilliantly, which is why we've had plans for 30 years.

Uh, one of my clients retired recently after being with me. Me, it was the first client I ever got and he retired last day was fantastic. I only, I hadn't done in 10 retiree. I love what I did. So, uh, so to me it's like a big holiday, right? I'd say I enjoy it. I enjoy providing value to time. Okay. So now I want to talk about limited companies and freelancers.

You know, if you're a self employed fuel on your own, in your own limited company and you don't have any income because you were paying yourself a low salary, you may get 80% of that, but that's really not going to be enough. He hasn't really announced any of that. I wonder if he's going to put us in the same bracket as self employed and say, well, we'll look at the average income with dividends over the last three years and average it out, which is what some of the European countries have done.

Maybe he'll follow suit. Maybe they are looking at the logistics of that is much more complicated, but maybe they will. Maybe they won't. So, uh, what I want to talk about next is, uh, control versus responsibility. If you take, if you have control, you take responsibility. If you give up, either control or respond to, you're giving up the other, you can't have control.

And. Uh, no responsibility. You've got to take responsibility and then you get controlled. If you take control, you will have to take the responsibility to composite, part and parcel. And if you give up responsibility, you're going to give up control. So stay in control, stay in charge of what's going on in here.

Keep your thoughts positive. Know that this will end and here is an opportunity. That you can't help. There's nothing you can do with this terrible out there and our businesses are probably suffering. But how we respond in the next couple of minutes, we'll determine in the next couple of months will determine what, what happens in the next 10 years.

Okay, so the next one is VAT. Please do not pay VAT until the end of June at the earliest. If you need the cash. If you don't need the cash in your show, you're going to be able, you're going to be fine monetarily. You can pay your VAT. But I would recommend if they say, you know, you don't have to, please don't pay it and hold onto the cash.

And they also saying that you know, it's going to be deferred. It's not going to be canceled, but it's going to be deferred and you can pay it over installments over until 2021 now, whether that's a, that's even going to be possible and not, we don't know. But you know, the moment that's where they're going.

And I think this government is doing quite a lot to help extend things and make sure they avoid hardship for businesses. Because they know that businesses, Oh, the root of a way that where the economy will go and so that, that's really key. Right. Uh, I also spotted today there was some, some help from the retail, leisure and hospitality, uh, association to something where you can get it grown.

Okay. And so I'll, I'll put that on the website, on the blog. Keep an on, click on that link and see if there's any money available and what it lost it lost if there was available, you can take advantage of it. I think there was a limit. Okay. Maybe two and a half thousand pounds. The next message is a message.

Other than this is take the money. If you need the money, take the money that's coming to you. It's fair. You've paid your taxes over years. Take the money. I have nothing coming to me, but I hope you have something coming to you. So you know, if you get statutory sick pay or you need a loan and you make sense to get the loan, you gotta be careful with the loan.

If you get groans to take the grounds. Uh, we'll talk about grounds next, but take the money, right. The money is essential to run the, to run your business. As long as you know it's, it's a loan and not a grant. Okay. So just bear that in mind. The next thing I want to talk about is grown. So they're awesome grands.

And people have asked me about grounds. And the grants are only available if you, if you are exempt from the small business rates. Now, if you live in service offices or you work in service offices, or you work in, um, uh, from home like I do, we're not entitled to it. So we're not gonna get it all right. But if we work in, in a premises way, we normally would pay business rates.

Unless we're exempt, then we're going to get a ground. And if you, in the next tier up, you get a bigger grant, there's 10,000 grounds and there's 25,000 grounds. If you're affected, then obviously contact us and we'll get you more information on that. But if you live in, so if you're working serviced offices, nothing at all.

Okay. So, um. The next thing I want to talk about is, um, Oh, get what's fair. I think we've talked about that, but gets what's fair and, uh, you know what you're entitled to. You're entitled to. Okay, so get what's fair. That's what really gets what get what's reasonable. Uh, the government is prepared to help you out.

And you know, there's a couple of groups that are still waiting to hear how they're going to be supported. But you know, it's, it's coming. And finally I just want to end with, you know, this is going to require a strategy rethink. You're going to need a 90 day plan. You're going to need some marketing activity to get ready for when this thing ends.

Because when anything, if it ends quickly, just say it ends in 12 weeks, weeks. There's going to be a massive bounce in the economy because we haven't really hammered it right down. And I said, last 12 months. And the economy is going to take a much longer time to scale up regardless of that. No. If you're doing your marketing, if you're adding great value, when things begin to take out, you will be ahead because many people are just.

In fear, they're scared. To be fair, you know, it's okay to be scared and fearful, but you've got to control the emotions. You've got to take that and go, look, it's happened. There's nothing. You're going to change it. I've got to control what I do. I've got to be responsible for what I do, and then we move forward.

Okay. And then of course, uh, we are running a course that will help, uh, our clients. And if you're not a client, I will help you as well on how to get yourself and you and your business. Set up and prepared for the next maybe 12 weeks, maybe 12 months if you're looking at it. If you'd like to join on my course, message me, contact me, email me, do something, raise your hands, get involved, and I would love nothing.

Would please me more than to help a small business community. I know how hard it is when things happen unprepared and I want to support you. I want to help you. All right, this is going to, Silva was a liking to, I'm going to get on with my day. I want to get this over to you today. Take care all the best.

Bye.