Mission: Possible. Nurses learn to market…
Hi and welcome to my new blog detailing my experiences as a fledgling entrepreneur over the last year. I thought it might be helpful to start off by introducing the business my partner and I have set up, and a bit about what we’ve been through for the last year.
Basically we help businesses manage their health and safety policies through providing training courses across a whole range of topics like food hygiene, first aid: in short anything that comes under health and safety we can advise on!
It was actually with a colleague and friend that I set up Binns-Tomlinson Safety Training Services Ltd: Rachel Binns and I qualified as nurses together five years ago, worked on the same ward and were both off on maternity leave last August when we decided to set something up rather than returning to the wards. We initially thought to advise on manual handling and first aid but this has since expanded quite a lot. We had to put together a business plan, which was a huge challenge as we’ve never written anything like that before. We then started trading in January this year. My role is specifically writing and delivering the training; Rachel also does training, but does the marketing and finance as well.
Getting a grant from Growing Routes and a loan from the Prince’s Trust was a major success for us and getting the HSE approval to deliver First Aid at Work training was another turning point. It was a lot of work and very expensive, but well worth it as a lot of business has come our way precisely because we’re officially approved.
One of our biggest successes has been to set up some baby and child first-aid training courses for parents – these have been popular because there’s a real demand from the public for basic, easy first aid for kids – both Rachel and I were struck by the lack of information on this topic when we were pregnant.
We’ve found marketing really difficult. Because we’re nurses we apologise for ourselves before we do anything else and it doesn’t look very good when we call someone up and then say sorry for calling them! We’ve needed some serious help on this, and went to Venturefest Yorkshire and attended some Institute of Marketing courses, along with getting a business mentor from the Prince’s Trust. We are getting better as time goes on, and have a much-improved initial sixty second speech to impress possible clients with now!
What’s been really interesting to note is that in our line of work, people will ring us if they find out about us, because everyone needs health and safety training. We’ve needed to get quite proactive about getting our name known, and have joined a couple of Chambers of Commerce and Women in Rural Enterprise (WIRE) to do that. Along this line we’ve done quite a bit of work with hotels so we’re starting to get a couple of contacts there which is great.
So, that’s a pretty good overview of everything that’s happened to us over the last year. There are some exciting events coming up, which I’ll tell you about in my next installment, along with any new company developments.
