Small business structures

Introduction

Welcome to the Starting your small business course. Let’s start by looking at the basic steps of setting up a business. After that you will explore in more depth the different structure options for a small business. This section will take approximately three hours to complete.

Once completed you will have the opportunity to obtain the ‘Small business structures’ badge. In this section, you will:

• define what a business is

• look at the steps to setting up a business in the UK

• focus on the official business structures that exist in the UK

• compare the different structures

• evaluating the benefits and issues of each of the structures

• use example case studies to match suitable structures with different businesses

• think about your own business idea and consider the structure that best matches it.

To help you along the way, there are a number of activities where you reflect on what you have been learning within this section and how you can apply these new skills and knowledge in practice. Several activities in this section and throughout the course have boxes for you to write and save answers in, although you may want to save your answers in a separate document for use after the course.

This first section is quite challenging and slightly longer than the other three sections to help you gain a clear understanding of how businesses are structured.