About BusinessNetwork

Alisdair Findlay trained and qualified at KPMG and EY in the 1990s, was a member of the ICAEW from 1995 to 2022, and held an insolvency licence from 1999 to 2022. He has spent more than thirty years working with small businesses across the UK — first as an employee of those firms, and from 1999 as the founder of his own practice.

That practice traded as Findlay James from 1999 until 2022, when it rebranded as Insolvency Direct Limited. Alisdair remains its semi-retired owner. Over twenty-five years of running it, he has acted as Liquidator, Administrator, and Trustee in Bankruptcy on more cases than he can comfortably count, and has worked closely with the owners, employees, accountants, and creditors of small businesses at the most difficult moments of their existence.

In recent years his work has shifted toward systems development, and BusinessNetwork is the result. The platform reflects a particular conviction formed over decades of insolvency work: that isolated businesses fail more often than connected ones. Small businesses go to the wall for many reasons, but a recurring pattern in the cases he has handled is a business that didn't have the suppliers, the customers, the advisers, or the peer relationships it needed to spot trouble early or to recover from it.

BusinessNetwork is built to address that pattern at the front end rather than the back end. Verified profiles, business-to-business reviews, and a structure built for the AI age — all designed to help small businesses build the connections that keep them out of the difficulty he has spent his career resolving.

Alisdair believes the small business sector is the real economy — the part that employs most people, generates most local activity, and underpins most communities. The motivation behind BusinessNetwork is straightforward: to give small business owners a constructive resource that uses what he has learned in difficult times to help others avoid them.

The full argument for what BusinessNetwork is, and why it works the way it does, is set out in the manifesto.