A three-part workshop course delivered online through our training room in Zoom is designed to tackle the fundamental actions you need to take for your start-up business or recently established business.

Is your business newly established and struggling to get traction maybe due to the challenges of COVID-19? Don’t worry as we have your back and we can help you get right back on track.

Our three-part workshop series, designed specifically for female entrepreneurs, is for businesses who have recently been established or with a turnover of less than £30k.

Our workshop course will focus on getting the fundamentals right to make your business more resilient. We will help you to understand what you need to do in order to get you back in control and to make your business more sustainable.

These workshops will provide you with the tools you need to hone your business resilience, marketing strategy and at the same time build your confidence. With discussions and plenty of practical exercises, we will help you to take the action you need to make your business thrive and grow.

Led by experts, these workshops will provide you with top tips and the chance to practice some of the skills you have learnt in a supportive and friendly environment. We will also include time for reflection and the opportunity to ask questions of our expert team.

Our experts

Bev Hurley, CBE, who is CEO of YTKO Group

Bev has a wealth of first-hand experience of growing several successful businesses and overcoming the challenges of the key tipping points of the scale-up journey. Her expertise as a successful angel investor in technology, and prolific innovator, and working with firms through YTKO's ERDF programmes, has given her the knowledge and experience to support over 22,000 businesses to sustain and grow, helped raise £70m in growth finance, and create over 10,000 new jobs for the UK economy.

Bev has launched six ground-breaking and multi award-winning services to address market gaps and unmet business growth needs, all of which have been replicated and scaled across the UK. She also created a highly successful P2P mentoring community in Norfolk, raising a commitment of over 10,000 mentoring hours in less than three weeks from launch. Since then, Bev has created or delivered many mentoring programmes, including from the British Business Bank and J.P. Morgan, and was consulted by BEIS to improve the Mentorsme portal.

Liz Ratcliffe, General Manager of Outset CIC

Liz brings over 20-years of experience of marketing, from creating effective strategies to deliver sales and bottom-line impact, brand building, market research, PR, compelling content generation, development of value propositions, B2B demand generation, and practical application of all tactics, both online and offline. She is an excellent producer of compelling content for business audiences, extracting benefits and creating strong value propositions with a PhD and five global awards from the Chartered Institute of Marketing, plus she is also a qualified Project Manager (APMP).

Working for ITV’s engineering division, she established an innovative research company, winning contracts with all UK broadcasters to support the change from analogue to digital, with turnover of £250k in the first 12 months. In her marketing consultancy business, she worked with SMEs and large corporate clients within a range of sectors, providing support, from strategic planning, to content provision, PR campaigns and digital marketing.

Liz also developed the future-oriented digital product portfolio for Ordnance Survey, managing their range of £140m p.a. digital and geographical products. She created an innovation unit to perform market analysis and agile product prototyping, forging partnerships with R&D units in UK and European Universities, and successfully launched new market-leading products to fulfil aggressive growth objectives. She created the award-winning P2P community, GeoVation, acting as a catalyst for ideas and product generation for the next generation digital mapping products and services.

At the Tech Partnership, Liz created new apprenticeship propositions for the Tech sector, chairing the forum for the apprentice provider stakeholder community, developing digital portals and data-driven campaigns to recruit young people onto apprenticeships. For Centriforce Products Ltd, an innovative plastics recycling manufacturer, she transformed their marketing and sales, extending international growth into new territories (USA and Middle East).

The Details

Split into three sessions, each with a break for lunch, we will focus on the following topics:

Session 1 - Tues 13 April - Understanding your market & business resilience

Session 2 - Tues 20 April - Honing your Marketing & Sales including the role of digital marketing

Session 3 - Tues 27 April - Building your Confidence - Tackling Imposter Syndrome & Improving your presentation skills

We recommend that you attend all three sessions to gain the maximum benefit for you and your business. For any queries, please email ana.leigh@outset.org Booking is essential as places are limited to ensure maximum learning and benefit for each participant. Please ensure that if you are unable to attend the session, that you let us know so that we can move this place to another participant. The workshop will be delivered via Zoom and full joining instructions will be provided in advance.

These workshops are being delivered by the Outset CIC/Accelerating Women’s Enterprise programme in collaboration with Enterprising Women, our community which aims to advance women’s enterprise by providing support at all stages of the business journey.