The past ten years have confounded expectations and sprung many surprises – both online and in the small business worlds. In December 1999, very few people could have envisioned the advent and huge impact of online social networks like Facebook and MySpace, and their business cousin LinkedIn. Some technological innovations would have been beyond the realms of too. Imagine predicting that millions worldwide would start cataloguing their innermost thoughts and activities in 140 characters or less – and broadcasting them to anyone interested. People would have laughed at the thought. Then Twitter exploded and everyone’s at it.

In 1999, who would have thought that small businesses and entrepreneurs would, just ten years later, be charged with the responsibility of dragging the UK out of the deepest recession since the Second World War? Who could have imagined that the then Chancellor Gordon Brown’s much-vaunted ‘end of boom and bust’ would come back to haunt him so spectacularly in the run-up to facing his first general election as Prime Minister?

With this in mind, here are my predictions for the next decade based on the assumption that many events, innovations and developments will surprise us and, in reality, predictions about the future can only be based on observations of the past.

  1. Welcome to The Teens. If the first decade of this century was ‘The Noughties’, the next decade will be known as ‘The Teens’.
  2. Growing pains. ‘The Teens’, like their human counterparts, will be challenging – so expect some teenage angst as the internet makes mistakes – and learns from them.
  3. The internet finds itself. The past decade has been about the internet growing up and learning to communicate. The next ten years will be about adventures, discovery and learning to mature.
  4. Teens need discipline. Teens are rebellious and experimental, and the same applies to the internet’s development, so expect more authoritarian levels of regulation.
  5. Function over form. The ease with which the internet lets people set up and run businesses will face a backlash in The Teens, with old school customer service and heritage more highly-valued than start-ups with no history or credibility. Business will be less about the best branding or flashiest website, and more about the values behind how people run their businesses.
  6. Long term love. Small businesses will benefit from increased customer loyalty as the movement away from monolithic faceless corporates gathers pace.
  7. In-shoring business success. In line with general emphasis on close long term relationships, outsourcing to cheaper offshore labour will come to an abrupt end. In The Teens, people will not trust companies they can’t access.
  8. Small is beautiful. UK small business will flourish in The Teens as we see a post-recession emergence of a new economy based on enterprise and fuelled by technology that empowers individuals to build lean, agile and profitable business models.

Fari Peyman launched internet Marketing firm Notting Hill Internet Services from his bedroom in 1999. Since then, the business has grown to an international team of more than 320.