Peer groups & pizza ovens
I just had a great meeting with a consultant over a Starbucks coffee to talk about how Business Link want to work more closely with local further education colleges.
We really do want to engage more with potential entrepreneurs – whether they’re on hairdressing courses or any other course that could mean starting their own enterprise – and we want to make sure that these students are thinking broadly as about the possibilities open to them if they have a good business idea.
I also went along to a York Professional Initiative event where we were launching a shiny new Business Link award to celebrate the very best of our entrepreneurs, the ones that have made a real impact in their field. We want to reward, encourage and celebrate their achievements, but also develop more funding and support for young businesses.
As ever I have been able to hear about some great ideas and potential new start-ups that I hope to be able to help develop. One is for a holiday business, but quite alternative holidays, very high-end, but relating especially to fishing and shooting. This individual is setting up a partnership with a famous cricketer’s son and are going to launch this in a niche that they have loads of credibility in. His parents run fishing and shooting businesses and he wants to use this expertise to design holidays for what these people are after. It stands a good chance of success just because he is so steeped in what those people are after – that is so important. They’re well resourced too so that’s a success story in the making. They’ll be coming onto the high-growth programme and my job is to help them with their business plan. Getting the business started is worth spending the time on, rather than getting too hung up on the brand itself. They just have to get out there and get people on these holidays!
I also met up with one of my more experienced high-growth start-ups who runs a series of web businesses – Kevin Nicholls - a whizz at search engine optimisation and is having enormous success at the moment.
And we had another of our peer group learning sessions on Thursday evening. There were about ten of our clients there and what they do is spend half of the session working on their own problems – we split the group into two and one half get the other half to advise them on sorting out these problems! Everyone is at varying stages of business development and it’s great that they can ask ‘what would you do?’ of those who are more experienced. It’s amazing, some of the solutions that they come up with. It’s key to listen to your peer group, people at your level will understand and come up with practical solutions. Could be from completely different businesses, but they will have advice that can help, new ways of thinking. The learning session was about search engine optimisation and what the big companies won’t tell you …
Then I met up with an Italian entrepreneur in my village who has started a brick-built oven business. It’s like the ‘new generation’ of barbecues, similar to a traditional pizza oven, and they build them for customers. The build and 
design is steeped in Italian history, you can cook bread in it and it’s a permanent feature of a garden. They want to know about how to start trading. Design registrations and trademarking are the first things to sort and then options for launch, finance, that type of thing. I am lucky – a chance meeting and I am able to help people with developing so many varied and exciting businesses. Even if it means that people approach me in my free time!
