The Heart of Business: How working with your community can transform your venture

It takes a village to raise a child, and a community to build a town.

In the UK (Western World) business-building and entrepreneurship are usually seen as an independent endeavour.  However, when budgets are tight and experience is lacking, what can you do to accomplish some of the tasks that help you achieve the success you are seeking?

Over the Corona Virus lockdown, I worked with my local business network Hub Central and provided free, weekly workshops to aid local businesses to understand PR and benefit from the experience of individuals who have built respected brands.

"Vision Redbridge Culture and Leisure have previously delivered the Enterprise Desk programme for new and existing micro, small and medium businesses in partnership with Work Redbridge which has informed the development of this permanent facility.

Hub Central is open on the second floor of Redbridge Central Library.

Our Business, Employment and Skills Hub will continue to offer an exclusive co-working space, 1-2-1 business advice, a range of workshops, training and networking events and library and online resources including books, journals and the COBRA business database."  Click the link for more information about Hub Central 

 

Here are a few suggestions for amazing growing businesses:

  • Connect with millennials within your network.  At our fingertips, you will have young people who understand and live on social media.  You can utilise and channel that energy, knowledge and interest to your advantage.  There are training course and events that your young people can sign up to, to help them understand business etiquette.
  • Lean on the matriarchs and patriarchs within your community.  They can often require a little extra cash to help subsidise their pension.  However, most importantly they have a wealth of experience and love to feel useful. Share online resources.  There can be times where you need to subscribe to an expensive online directory or resource – £5000 plus per year. You can pool your resources together with other like-minded businesses and subscribe together to use platforms and services.

Collaboration can change the ‘norm.’  When you remove the greed out of capitalism, it allows for great businesses to thrive.

It removes the ego from the equation and helps aligned parties to collaborate and build powerful entities.

There are numerous ways to connect and build your business. What resources are you using to help you grow your business?

This blog post is written by Nicola Millington, founder of FP Comms