What do you do when you feel you’ve been ripped off? I asked myself this very question when I went to Liverpool with my wife recently to watch a football match. The match wasn't great and my only solace was departing to what I hoped would be a half decent hotel that my wife had booked beforehand. We were given a family/disabled room and had to pay on arrival with a credit card. The clue should have been that the hotel looked like it was above a club. We arrived at the hotel around 7.30pm and the ground floor room had music pounding up(!) from below.

All the marketing experts go on about list sizes, unique visitors, squeeze pages and conversion rates as if buying a sophisticated email distribution programme is the answer to all your ‘lack of customers’ issues. It is a compelling argument. Email campaigns are as cheap as chips, they look easy to run, and no-one can deny that they can create stunning results.

Too many businesses feel that it is Year Three of the recession. And they have tried everything but nothing really seems to work. So what’s going on? The list is endless. The well is dry. People aren’t buying like they were. There are more, cheaper competitors. Customers can do it themselves, or they can wait. Advertising doesn’t work anymore. Networking is an empty promise. Social media is just so much hot air. Strategy is all very good but what about some sales now?

Three new clients. Three stories. All identical. They go as follows: “Year Three of the recession. Demand has collapsed. No-one is making decisions. We’ve got all the right marketing stuff in place (website, squeeze pages, twitter feeds, webinars, followers, auto-responders, banner ads, pay-per-clicks) but we just aren’t making the sales.”

The growth of a business from idea to birth through youth and onwards is a great concept. At what stage of the life-cycle of a business is yours? Richard and Abigail Bromell’s Charterhouse Auctions, in its journey from the bedroom to saleroom, covers most of the highs and lows of starting and growing a business.

Everyone loves a story about the underdog; it is part of the whole small business and entrepreneurship ethos. The stereotypical Branson-esque story goes: find a dull industry and go in and shake it up by delivering a service that the customers want. Branson has done it in air and rail travel. More modestly, enter Ollie Rastall and David Piper at Source Supplies.

There is the absurd statistic that most men think that they are ‘above-average drivers’. They really believe that they are ‘above average’. Well, most of them do!!!!  Honestly…!

There is the stereotypical story of the entrepreneur who sees their industry and realises that the way their customers are treated has to change. The story of Ceri Smith and Sean Thornton, who now run Eze Fitness, a gym chain based at 8 sites across the UK, is one such story.