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Xenios Thrasyvoulou, CEO of the innovative London-based online skills marketplace, PeoplePerHour.com predicts small businesses and freelancers will need smarter ways to generate income or handle work in 2008. He predicts:
1) The credit squeeze will also hit small businesses hoping to fund expansion through re-mortgaging their home, so many will be cash-strapped in 2008. With lenders looking more carefully at income to service loans, finding additional income streams like PeoplePerHour.com. boosts smart small business owner's borrowing power.
2) Small businesses get tougher on clients that delay payments, thanks to sites like PayonTime.co.uk which show how to get money in faster. Higher interest rates make it punitive for small business to go into debt so they will be more likely to charge Late Payment Interest (statutory rate is 8% over base rate - set twice per year).
3) Smart freelancers and small businesses beat chasing debt by finding work on sites like PeoplePerHour.com, where they get paid almost immediately for their work through PayPal®.
4) The credit squeeze will mean small businesses will have less to spend, so will use more flexible labour, from PeoplePerHour.com to cut costs without cutting resources.
5) Smart small businesses will use virtual workers to help make the business 'disaster-proof' from floods, fires, pandemics etc so they can keep going.
6) Small businesses buy in 'just enough' expertise on-demand to create the workforce equivalent of the 'just in time' processes that revolutionised manufacturing. They use PeoplePerHour.com to buy in 'just enough' expertise from virtual workers to handle more work, or extend into new areas.
7) Small businesses will start learning how to use technology better, for example, by using the web to its full capacity, along with VoIP to become more global. With sites like Peopleperhour.com you can now have a developer in India, a designer in central Europe, a bookkeeper in Berkshire, and an engineer in California.
8) Small business globalisation will accelerate, now that sites like PeoplePerHour.com open up foreign markets with less risk through secure payment and ranking systems.
9) Holiday cover is a thing of the past for smart small businesses that spread the load with a choice of virtual workers through PeoplePerHour.com
10) Despite banking estimates to the contrary, entrepreneurship will rise driven by increasing nervousness about job stability. Taking control by venturing out alone is more attractive to the entrepreneurial spirit when there's less to lose by staying put and astute entrepreneurs realise that small businesses are more resilient than large corporates during economic downturns, with fewer shareholders and debt to service.
About PeoplePerHour.com
Founded in 2007 by two Cambridge graduates: Xenios Thrasyvoulou and Simos Kitiris, PeoplePerHour.com are targeting an estimated £5 billion opportunity. That’s based on the Federation of Small Business (FSB) figures for 2006 showing the total annual spend on part-time, agency workers and casual labour in the UK across all businesses was £70 billion a year. 4.4 million small businesses in the UK are currently growing by 10% annually and account for 35% of the UK workforce, but only 44% of the small business workforce is in full-time employment.
PeoplePerHour are already the UK leaders for the online skills market. To date over 1,000 projects posted by UK businesses on PeoplePerHour.com have been successfully completed by a selection of 2,600+ registered providers from the UK (49%), and (in decreasing order) from US, India, Argentina and Spain, enabling UK small businesses to tap into a global labour market.
Buyers choose from an average of five bids per project posted and in many cases can access CV, photo, description, sample work and referee contact details.
PeoplePerHour.com ensures providers get paid on completion through a combination of their unique escrow facility plus PayPal.
The company has already attracted £350,000 of seed investment from prominent angel investors and is in discussions with a number of VCs.
PeoplePerHour.com practises what it preaches. Their team consists of developers in India, designers in the US, a virtual assistant, PR agent and bookkeeper – all from the site.
Busiest work categories are (in descending order): Web Development & Programming, Design, Admin Support, Writing (including Translations and Transcriptions), Marketing & PR, and Research.
The typical buyer runs a small business (usually less than 20 people). No sectoral bias: companies seem to vary from boutique financial firms, Internet companies, property and PR agencies.
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penny[.]phpr.co.uk 
