Technology is reshaping the brewing and hospitality sectors, presenting a wealth of opportunities to improve processes and enhance customer experiences.

If the pandemic taught us anything, it was the value of collaboration. Driven by necessity, businesses joined forces to remarkable effect, looking beyond the profit towards positive outcomes for people, place and the planet.

Lancashire not-for-profit business Chorley School Sport Partnership, which provides PE, sports and health activities in schools, is going from strength to strength with eighteen members of staff and contracts with organisations including Sport England and Youth Sport Trust.  

Growth abounds at Cumbria-based family business, Bath House, in more ways than one. As the pandemic eased, Bath House wanted to look again at their business’ direction and have a chance to take stock and plan. 

A hair salon is on course for a new period of growth while weathering the impact of inflation after participating in a short, focussed programme by Lancaster University Management School.

As so many business owners feel apprehensively forced to review their prices, it can be intimidating and with inexperience making them want to shy away from it, instead of facing what can feel like uncomfortable decisions, head on.

For 50 years the business world has trod the well-worn path that an enterprise will only survive and succeed by committing to a culture of ‘us versus them.’ But the world is changing rapidly. Decision-makers are under pressure to take on broad external factors such as the environment, community and social justice. Growth at all costs and to the detriment of others just doesn’t cut it anymore. We have reached a critical fork in the road.

We are living in a rapidly changing and uncertain world. And because the world is changing, so are customer’s needs which means businesses must evolve, adapt and change to remain relevant and competitive.

When you run a small business, there’s never enough time in the day to service your customers and handle the day-to-day operations, let alone take a step back to develop any of your ideas to grow or innovate. Tarnia Elsworth felt that time-poverty acutely.

Why it’s people, not technology, that will make or break an SME’s best attempts to prevent an attack.

You may have thought that the success of a business’s efforts to prevent an attack by cybercriminals would be defined by how much it spends on its technical defences. Surely, ploughing more money into the latest hard or software will create an impenetrable fortress? Not necessarily, says Dr Robyn Remke of Lancaster University Management School.