At the weekend I was asked to participate at The Enterprise Show, Leeds, which was an event hosted by Business Link as a ‘one stop shop’ for people with a business idea, to attend and get all the information they need to get their business off the ground.
As a Make Your Mark Ambassador, I’m often asked to do things like this. This is me at the start of the day:
Video 1 at the shows
During the course of the day I was so busy speaking to the people who stopped by my stand, that I completely forgot to do any video blogging, so this is me ’rounding up’ at the end!
I am a Make Your Mark Ambassador and I was invited to speak to the fashion students yesterday at the Leeds College of Art!
Being a women in business, I am often called upon to deliver talks to schools when they have an Enterprise programme or to take part in a Business Studies class. The fashion students wanted to hear about my career path from when I was at fashion college (I went to the London College of Fashion) through my PR career and ending up running my own business. They are doing a Case Study on my business to see how my creative background has influenced my current role and how creativity plays a part in commercial business.
Today I read an article that advised me that I should regularly monitor my competition to see what they are up to, to work out their sales strategy and showing me a few ‘back door’ ways to keep tabs on what my competitors are doing online.
A word with only 5 letters and yet it is such a BIG word.
We are all living in a time where trust is one of the most important elements of human interaction. Let’s face it - do you trust the banks any more, or big corporations? I remember growing up in an era where my parent’s generation did not think to question their doctors, or other people in authority as the trust was automatic; whereas nowadays we are all having to become mini-experts in the things that affect our lives as we don’t have as much unquestioning trust in what we are told. Trust in 2009 has to be earned.
Waking up to snow on Monday I was both excited (hey it’s not every day we get to play in 8 inches of snow) and disappointed because I didn’t want it to dampen enthusiasm for Make Your Mark with a Tenner - our fab new enterprise initiative.
So I decided to combine the two (snow + tenner - was that an Ideas Mashup oh yes) and set a challenge for people to create a Tenner-related snowman. The challenge was set to MYM staff and also via Twitter, where we have 400+ followers all desperate to make a snowman no doubt.
In reflection of these belt-tightening times, there has been a definite mindset shift in all of us about how we choose to spend our money. Saving is the new spending – there is now no shame in brandishing 2-for-1 meal vouchers in restaurants and being chic on the cheapis the way forward for frugal fashionistas.
But has this thrifty approach impacted entrepreneurs and the way they choose to run their businesses?
We asked our lovely MYM ambassadors for their top cost-saving business tips to help entrepreneurs through these testing financial times - and Nadine Hill of the Dream PA had this helpful advice:
Hey - it’s snowing and let’s face it, it doesn’t happen often to this scale in the UK (well, not since I was a kid in the late 70’s and 80’s!) So as my children are home with me today with school being closed, we had to do a mercy dash to the shops and buy Jet some cat litter. She is so posh she won’t pee outside when it’s snowing like this! So, on the way, we took the chance to have a snowball fight! I think it’s the first time in my 6 year olds’ life that the snow has been ‘plenty’ enough to actually do it properly!
Oh how proud I am! I feel enterprise skills are so important to progressing in today’s commercial world. People need to know how to identify a need or spot an opportunity, find a way to do it, tell others about it and be able to turn it into a commercial reality. Our economy needs continual innovation - not just in these ‘gloomy’ times, but all the time.
Today whilst collecting my 6 year old daughter from school, I thought about this question and whether the most enterprising ideas come from a ‘Eureka’ moment or gritted teeth?
To fill you in, I’m up in beautiful Yorkshire - well it usually is beautiful but today it’s raining and snowing! This was the reason for my gritted teeth but it did give me an enterprising idea…
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