With the surge of energy costs has come a rise in the cost of delivering our business, a factor that huge companies seem far more capable of controlling but I don't believe it is just energy that has caused this problem.

Looking back over the past decade, it has become obvious that our overhead has grown and continues to grow.  A large part of this is the implementation of technology.  Technology is driven by the large corporations, they own it and they sell it into the market and people get used to us, start relying on it and force smaller companies to find solutions to implement it. 

For example, take the technology behind online booking.  10 years ago it was in its infancy, many small companies were not using it.  I remember talking to a far larger operator than us about how beneficial it was but their staff were reluctant to change and the software was slightly cumbersome and the idea of exchanging availability data and developing online travel agents (OTAs) was not in the thought process of most holiday parks.  It is now commonplace, so much so that customers expect to find a campsite pitch online and book it online.  This development all sounds amazing and I was certainly sold on it.

The reality is slightly different.  The first main movers in the market would have been the largest operations, lets assume Haven got into it who may have 10000 pitches to sell across the country.  They could afford to pay a web developer £50,000 to develop some booking software as it only amounts to 20p per pitch.  For a small company, say us, who have 30 pitches, this cost is £1666 per pitch.  Eventually a company develops and spots the market for all the small campsites wanting to get on the internet.  The end result is Haven can afford to develop cheaply and directly, whilst the small company has to use a middle man (the booking software company, in our case Anytime Booking), and pay an ongoing subscription which has increased their overhead disproportionately.  That cost works out at approximately £34 per pitch, recurring yearly.

Add on every other bit of technology (card transactions, till software, office software, book keeping software, online marketing services and many more) and the £34 grows and grows, whilst Haven can leverage its size.  This has obviously always been the case against big and small for buying power, training costs, human resources departments, legal departments.  All things a small company outsources at a disadvantage to the big company.  My concern is that it just grows.

Over my lifetime, our world has become increasingly complex, complexity is costly.  One of the resonating arguments of Brexit was to free the country of bureaucracy, the promised bonfire of EU laws,  As it turns out, nothing like that has happened and why should it.  Money has always been power so if its in the advantage of the biggest companies to have lots of expensive overheads because it stops small companies competing, it will remain.  So for small companies, it is an ever increasing strangulation which is probably why I have moved my mind from capitalist to socialist, Brexiteer to Remainer / rejoinder but in all honestly it isn't about finding a political home just a perspective of where it all ends.

So in the bigger picture of the world, if we have ceded power to the corporations and financiers behind them we are funnelling to a situation which is good or bad?  Eliminating competition means increasing prices.  Our energy is not state owned.  Our food supply is not state owned.  In both sectors, there are few suppliers and an alarming rise in cost.  The farm shop who may have grown a carrot and sold it directly has gone so the carrot can now cost more - and it does.

There is only one solution, which is within controlling power.  Highly unlikely that anything other than money will control power.  In a world where the powerful control the message, the only power is to become educated beyond the message but that starts when people feel betrayed, pressured and suppressed which is why striking is on the rise and why Iranians protest against their regime but it is only the collective that takes back control.

Its amazing how a little business issue turns into a full blown conspiracy theory. 

Back to the start, there are two choices in the battle to make a small business competitive:

1. beat them by finding a collective to fight for a change in the system or
2. join them by finding a collective to gain power.

Either way, there is strength in numbers.  Bad news for someone as independent as me.