Celebrating Womens Enterprise Day

As the UK and US celebrate Womens Enterprise Day today (17 Nov), it seems like a good opportunity to celebrate women in business and highlight the need for more support for female entrepreneurship. When we started Active Marketing & Design in 2006, we were fortunate to benefit from start-up help from organisations like the Womens Enterprise, Education and Training Union (WEETU) and Women in Rural Enterprise (WiRE), but their resources are sadly limited by continued funding cuts. Other organisations like Enterprising Women have offered free business support to women in Norfolk in the past but now charge an annual membership fee. As part of Women in Rural Enterprise, we were recently invited to make a representation to the Enterprise Minister, Mark Prisk MP, to showcase the success of women in business and highlight the types of support that we need from organisations such as WiRE.

According to BERR statistics, only 15% of the UK's 4.7 million enterprises are female-led. With commentators suggesting that public sector redundancies will hit women hardest as their (commonly) part time roles are first to be axed, this presents an excellent opportunity for women to start up a business with the right support. In my experience, women starting up in business need significant support to boost their confidence and encourage them to take the plunge. One to one advice, training and networking certainly helped us to believe in our abilities to run our marketing company. In the long term, female-led businesses are often more sustainable as we tend to have more conservative ambitions for growth and therefore are less likely to risk losing it all in the pursuit of financial success. Yet it is very difficult to quantify and recognise the contribution to the economy of the numerous female-owned microbusinesses, especially if they are home-based and fall beneath the VAT threshold.

We have supported a number of Norfolk's female-owned businesses to start up and grow through marketing activities such as branding, web design and advertising. Some examples of our successful female clients include:

Igloo Shoes
Karen Eason
Dare To Fly
Care Motoring
Adepta
The Retreat
Make it Count

We have to keep highlighting the importance of female entrepreneurship and can only hope that our current Government will recognise the importance of supporting women to make the first steps into business as part of the bigger economic picture.

Active Marketing & Design is a full service marketing & design company with offices in West Norfolk & Broadland. We specialise in supporting growing businesses in the rural economy through high impact design for print, cost-effective social media strategy & web design.

Women mean business in Norwich

I came back with some really strong and inspirational messages from today's launch of the WEETUnetwork at Dunston Hall. It was fantastic to see sparky TV presenter Trisha Goddard complete with big new hairdo fighting fit and well on the road to recovery after battling with breast cancer. Never one to mince her words, Trisha had plenty to say about inspiring our daughters to be the businesswomen of the future, and talked passionately about instilling a work ethic in young people, just as her parents made her work hard for her pocket money as a child. I'm really keen to support young women into business and self employment and to give them the opportunity to consider enterprising ambitions in the future, and it seemed that Trisha would be an excellent role model for them to aspire to.

Trisha referred fondly to memories of her grammar school headmistress who had every day instilled a sense of self-belief in her pupils through rousing school assemblies, something I think is lost in most modern schools since the demise of the daily assembly.

She spoke of how her eldest daughter is currently working her way through university, despite her "privileged" upbringing, and how she encouraged her daughters not to feel the need to conform but to cherish their individuality. It seemed that she was suggesting that this unique selling point in each of our personalities is key to our success as individuals in work and life, a point which resonates closely with my thoughts on successful marketing which is so much easier when your business is distinctive.

Trisha also spoke from personal experiences about the critical importance of balancing health and work, firstly in her own battle with a mental breakdown and of course more recently her cancer diagnosis. She suggested that women usually work harder than men in managing both the home and work and we need to learn to give ourselves a break. These thoughts were echoed by the second speaker, Jane Trippett-Jones (Mayor of Diss) who raved about the benefits of a regular massage to simply reduce tension and stress. Both speakers highlighted the importance of voluntary work as key to building self-confidence and as an ideal route to pave the way for women to return to work.

WEETUnetwork is a new venture from the established Womens Employment Enterprise and Training Unit for "women who mean business". With the room bursting at the seams for the first event and Norwich North MP Chloe Smith notable amongst the audience, it was clear that WEETU mean business with their aim to become the recognised voice for women in the Eastern region and I hope the network continues to grow.

www.weetu.org