In the hustle and heart of the UK economy, there's a quiet force driving innovation, community resilience, and everyday progress: the sole trader. From local electricians and market traders to freelance marketers and Etsy creators, sole traders are the backbone of the UK's economic ecosystem.
Yet, despite their contribution, they remain underserved by the very industries designed to support business: accountancy, legal services, finance, technology. It's time we changed that.
The economic engine we overlook
The numbers are not marginal. At the start of 2025 there were an estimated 5.7 million private sector businesses in the UK. Of those, 3.2 million were sole proprietorships — 57% of the entire business population, and by some distance the most common legal form. Another 2.1 million were actively trading companies and 368,000 were ordinary partnerships. Perhaps the most telling figure of all: 4.3 million businesses, 75% of the total, had no employees at all beyond the owner or owners. (Business population estimates for the UK and regions 2025, published on GOV.UK on 2 October 2025; figures as at the start of 2025.)
Read that back. Three quarters of British business is one person, or a couple of people, and no payroll. They contribute billions to GDP and create the kind of localised economic stability that big corporations simply can't replicate. They are diverse. Many are women. Many are immigrants. Many are working around caring responsibilities. Sole traders are brave, resourceful, and incredibly hard-working — but often navigating complex professional challenges on their own.
The problem: professional services aren't built for them
Accountants want clients on £1m turnover. Law firms want retainers. Financial advisers want investable assets. Software firms design tools for teams, not for one-person enterprises. In short: the professional services sector, by and large, is built for bigger. The systems are complex, the pricing unclear, and the service model outdated.
The economics behind that are real, not lazy. A traditional firm's cost to serve is roughly the same whether the client turns over £60,000 or £600,000 — the onboarding, the compliance checks, the year-end. So the sector solved for the client who can absorb that cost, and everyone else got a cheaper version of a service designed for somebody else. Not a service designed for them.
What this costs in practice — a worked example
Abstract complaints about access change nothing. Here's a concrete one. The trader below is illustrative — an invented business — but every rule and threshold cited is real and checked.
Meet a self-employed electrician. Turnover £62,000. Costs £14,000. Profit £48,000. No employees, no accountant, does their own Self Assessment each January in one long evening.
Three questions decide their next two years, and the sector is not set up to answer any of them cheaply.
1. Do they need to register for VAT? No. The VAT registration threshold is £90,000 of taxable turnover in the last 12 months, and they're at £62,000. Straightforward — provided somebody tells them that the test is turnover, not profit.
2. Are they inside Making Tax Digital for Income Tax? Yes — and this is where almost everyone gets caught. MTD for Income Tax applies from 6 April 2026 where qualifying income exceeds £50,000, dropping to £30,000 from 6 April 2027 and £20,000 from 6 April 2028. The trap is the definition. GOV.UK states that qualifying income is total income from self-employment and property before expenses — in other words, turnover. Our electrician looks at £48,000 of profit, concludes they're under the threshold, and relaxes. Their actual qualifying income is £62,000. They're in from day one.
3. What does being "in" mean? Digital records, plus quarterly updates to HMRC and a final declaration — five submissions a year where there used to be one. HMRC works out your status from the Self Assessment return for the previous tax year, and you're expected to calculate it yourself rather than wait to be told.
Now put a price on that gap. A firm that never returns the call of a £62,000 sole trader has just left them to discover a five-times increase in filing obligations on their own, in the January after it started. The professional cost of an hour of decent advice here is trivial. The cost of nobody giving it runs to penalties, panic, and an entire year of records built the wrong way round.
This is what "underserved" actually means. Not that sole traders can't afford advice. That the advice was never packaged in a way they could buy.
The vision: levelling the playing field
Democratising professional services means removing the friction. It means making expert support accessible, affordable, and actually designed with sole traders in mind. At the core are three ideas:
- Digital-first simplicity. Tools should be easy to use, with no training required. Mobile-first, jargon-free, and built to save time, not create admin.
- Transparent, modular pricing. Subscription or pay-as-you-go models work best. People want to know what they're paying and why. No hidden fees.
- Human support without the fluff. Real advice, without the gatekeeping. Customer service that responds like a person, not a process.
To which I'd now add a fourth, because the first three are aspiration and this one is engineering:
- Cost to serve has to fall, or nothing else on this list is possible. You cannot serve a £62,000 trader profitably at £1,200 a year using a process designed for a £600,000 company. The onboarding has to be automated, the record-keeping has to come off a bank feed, and the compliance has to run in the background. That's the entire argument for AI-powered, human-centric accounting — not novelty, but the only route to an economically viable service for the 3.2 million.
Where the good intentions fail
Plenty of firms say they want to serve small clients. Here's where it comes apart.
- Cheap version of the same thing. A discounted service built on the old cost base just loses money quietly until it gets withdrawn.
- Self-service with no human. A portal and a knowledge base is not advice. The moment a sole trader has a genuinely important question, the whole model fails them.
- Pricing that hides the cliff. "From £30 a month" that becomes £900 at year end is worse than an honest £900.
- Jargon as a moat. If your onboarding email uses the phrase "qualifying income" without defining it, you've already lost the person you claim to serve.
- Designing for the client you wish you had. The average sole trader does not have a bookkeeper, a laptop open at their desk, or a spare Tuesday. Design for a phone, in a van, at 7pm.
My mission: building for the underdog
This isn't theory — it's personal. Through platforms like Buzz Accounting and beyond, I'm working to reimagine how sole traders access the tools and advice they need to thrive. The future of professional services is not elite. It's open, agile, and built around the individual. The same operating discipline that makes a small business profitable is what makes serving small businesses profitable: remove friction, one step at a time, until the economics work.
If you're a sole trader, do this in the next seven days
- Work out your qualifying income. Add up gross self-employment and property income before expenses. Not profit. If it's over £50,000, MTD for Income Tax applies to you from 6 April 2026.
- Check your turnover against £90,000 on a rolling 12-month basis, not a tax-year basis. That's how the VAT test works.
- Get your records off paper and onto a bank feed. Whatever software you choose, the requirement is digital records, and retrofitting a year of receipts in March is misery.
- Write down the three questions you've been avoiding and get one hour of proper advice on them. One hour, priced up front.
- Check the £1,000 trading allowance if you have a small side income as well — income of £1,000 or less gross doesn't need reporting to HMRC at all.
Let's not just champion small business — let's serve them
We love to talk about "supporting small business" in the UK, but support only matters when it's felt. If you're building something for yourself, you deserve services that meet you where you are — not where someone else thinks you should be. The future is local. Personal. Independent. And it's being built one sole trader at a time. If you're building the firm that serves them, that's a conversation I'm always up for.