After a successful turn out our team would like to say a huge thank you to all the speakers, businesses and staff that played a role in putting our ‘Summer Bash’ networking event together on 7th July at Craven Park Training and Enterprise Centre. For our first event this year we had 96 people book on, but a turnout of over 100 attendees throughout the day.
This event brought together a collection of business owners located within Hull City Councils Managed Workspace Centres and businesses across the city and region. It was a huge opportunity for start-ups, SMEs, and businesses owners within our centres to build and expand upon their networks as well as making themselves known to other businesses within the area.
Throughout the day stalls featured our guest speakers offering helpful advice as well as stalls showcasing the variety of different companies we have based at our centres. This was a great chance for businesses to get to know what support is available to them as well as an opportunity to look for potential businesses connections to work with.
On the day we had three guest speakers informing attendees of the various sources of support and funding available for businesses. These speakers were well received by those in attendance with 90% of attendees who were polled providing positive feedback about the content of their presentations.
Our very own Managed Workspace Centre Manager Allan Rookyard opened proceedings and introduced the event and speakers. First up was Hull Libraries Business and IP Centres highlighting the endless amount of support they can offer companies through various services within the library and programs that are led out there – these include IP Centre, Innovate Humber and CLLD (Community Led Local Development). All three services offer various resources to help different aspects of your business from researching initial ideas to checking whether your intellectual property (IP) is protected as well as offering local funding through the CLLD service.
Jon Brunton from HEYLEP was next up explaining the various funding options available and the resources the Growth Hub team can offer to provide business support. He spoke about how they provide free impartial information, advice and signposting businesses to help them overcome barriers to their growth.
The final speaker of the day was Phil Hall from the Employment Hub, who spoke about the different resources available through Hull Training and Adult Education to help benefit unemployed people who are looking for work by offering them advice to support them in their career. They also provide support for businesses who are looking to expand through different schemes available via the employment inclusion schemes. These schemes are Employment Growth Grant, Upskilling Grant and HBEES (Hull Business Energy Efficiency Scheme).
Overall, we have an overwhelming amount of positive feedback from the forms we have received as 97% said they would recommend our events to an associate. Numerous businesses have reached out for support since being made aware of the various sources and how to access it.
We want to take this opportunity to thank those in attendance, giving your time as an SME is so precious, so putting on an event needs to be extremely beneficial to reward that. We also want to thank the speakers for taking giving up their time to talk and share the support they provide – together we can build an incredible business community that will support one another.