2014: the Year of the Entrepreneur!

Time is really ticking by now and I'm starting to wind things down for this year.

I wanted to wish all of my lovely friends and followers a very Happy Christmas: I hope you use it well to relax with family and friends and recharge your batteries.

I'm not sure why but I'm very excited about 2014; I think it's going to be year when we see real growth in our economy after some pretty dire and dismal years since the Crash in 2008.  Thank goodness; we can all start to breathe a little now.

Elizabeth Assaf was visiting the Britsh Museum the other day where she attended a SME Summit hosted by The Times newspaper and Santander, the first summit of its kind which supports growing SMEs. 

In her article for the the Huffington Post a few days ago she spoke of Nick Wheeler, from Charles Tyrwhitt Shirts, who gave a very positive talk and urged businesses to forge ahead despite set-backs.  He ought to know; he lost £70,000 in his first year of business and went bust twice.  Despite this is now runs an incredibly successful business. 

Shaa Wasmund, founder of Smarta, believes that 2014 will see the rise and rise of VISUAL social media on platforms such as YouTube.  Personally I'm also thinking of Vimeo and those little Vine video clips I talked about a few months back in a blog post.

What was even more encouraging was that James Caan talked about 2014 as "a perfect opportunity to invest and grow". 

Although Sir Richard Branson wasn't in attendance at the Summit, he has nevertheless spoken of 2014 as being the "year of the entrepreneur" in a recent blog post on LinkedIn

Who am I to argue with the likes of Branson & Caan?

On that note I want to wish you all a very Happy Christmas and a fabulous start to the New Year.

We'll be back here on 2nd January 2014.

See you then! 

Nicky

New E-Zine for Small Businesses: Oxon & Berks

Did you start a new business this year?  Were you a freelancer or a solepreneur?  Did you find yourself searching the Internet looking for answers to a whole string of questions? 

I felt like this.  Some days I felt as though I'd taken myself off on a big fishing expedition only to net a Stickleback.

For this reason I've decided to start the New Year on a positive note by launching an e-zine for entrepreneurs and small business start-ups who are very much doing things on a shoestring budget.  I'm going to target the Berkshire & Oxfordshire regions initially and see where things take me. 

I have all sorts of ideas and plans, based upon what I felt I needed when I was starting up.  My aim is to provide you with one source of information where you can find links to HMRC for tax returns, VAT registration or what you can claim back as a small business.  I'd like to set out who offers an excellent but affordable web design service, the best networking groups relevant to your business in your area, articles to help you with social media & content marketing and lots more.

I shall be ringing up companies to see if I can talk them into giving me discounts for the things that matter to start-ups (you never know, it's worth a try!)

I'm also aiming to invite various 'gurus' to write regular articles or organise Google Hangouts on Air so that you can learn how to market your new business and reach out to your niche market, how to manage and optimise your social media profiles and how to start writing a business blog, for example.

For this I need your help!

Short Survey

If you live in Berkshire or Oxfordshire, you're considering starting up as an entrepreneur, freelancer, solepreneur, microbusiness, woman in business and you feel you'd benefit from a quarterly e-zine being sent directly into  your Inbox then please could I ask you to fill in a survey?

All research and work on the e-zine will remain entirely separate from my Virtuoso Assistant business and your emails will remain confidential and will not be used as part of any future marketing campaigns.


All you need to do now is click on the link below to complete the survey.  Thank you so much for your time.

Co-Working & Shared Offices

Will Co-Working be the new way for SMEs, freelancers, entrepreneurs and start-ups to work independently together?

This evening I was doing a bit of research and clicked on a link, which took me to another website where I found an article about 'co-working'.  I'd not heard that term before and I wanted to know all about it.  I don't like not knowing things.

I've discovered that, despite the hardships that most of us have endured during the economic downturn, it's a recognised fact that since the recession began the entrepreneurial spirit has grown in strength.  An explosion of creative ideas was also experienced after the Great Depression in the 1930s as people tried to find a way of making their lives better.

Last summer Andrew Cave of The Telegraph newspaper wrote about an interview he had with Julie Meyer, founder of "First Tuesday" and a leading entrepreneur herself.  During the interview Julie expressed her belief that university leavers in their 20s, together with older groups of people who have felt let down by large businesses and corporations during the recession (myself included), are going to be the ones driving the economy in the future as they take control of their own lives with the help of the Internet, networking, business events, etc. 

"Business Matters" magazine stated last year,

"The number of micro companies with five employees or less which are benefiting from networking via social media has doubled since the previous quarter."

As such, I'm very excited about the idea of bringing individuals together to work.  Regus Connect are trying to make it happen and are planning to roll out 10 new sites in January 2014 (so not long to wait).  If you log onto their website you can vote for the town/city where you'd like a new Regus Connect site to be.  At the moment it looks like London has the greatest share of the votes, followed by Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Cambridge and Reading.  Good news as far as I was concerned - I registered another vote for Reading.  I'm not sure about their rates at the current time and will contact them for further information.  

Whilst I was doing some research on the subject I noticed that Startacus wrote an article just last month about the Regus Connect project. 

TheCube in London has a very similar set up and again acknowledge the need, since the recession began in 2008, to create new ways of working together, "The space is open plan and designed to make one feel calm and happy". 

Their prices obviously reflect their location but they have a variety of packages, depending on how little or how often you want to utilise their services.

As a virtual assistant I don't have cause to travel with my work, unless a client asks me to attend a meeting with them, for example.  In fact one of the reasons why I became a virtual assistant was because I was so fed up with having to work in stuffy, noisy open-plan offices where there is not one iota of privacy.  That said, there are definitely times when I miss chatting with colleagues, sharing a joke and bouncing ideas off them.  I believe co-working really is a great way to connect with like-minded people and to offer one another support.

I'd be very interested to hear your comments about the idea.  I shall be sharing this post on my LinkedIn page if you'd like to comment there.  Perhaps we could start a group together so that we can keep each other updated with news and possible venues? 

I look forward to hearing from you all.

Nicky