So what's this all about then?

Welcome to the Support Independents blog!

Support Independents is all about, unsurprisingly, supporting independent businesses. The aim is to raise the profile of independent businesses whether on your local high street or online. It is often too easy to go into a chain store rather than a local independent retailer and that is what this is about. Reminding and raising awareness of the alternatives.

There are 4,478,595 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK today (source, 2011) accounting for 99.9% of all enterprises. Almost all of these enterprises (99.2%) are classed as small with 0 to 49 employees. This makes independent businesses and small enterprises extremely important, who knew there were so many of us!!

It is also this group that probably receive the least amount of support from banks and other organisations with government business support programmes often seeing cuts. This blog therefore hopes to raise our spirits, raise awareness and build a network.

So, do you support independents?