End of Term

If you have ever wondered what the Hive does, and what we offer visit http://www.businesshive.ntu.ac.uk/activities.asp. I work for Phil on the SPEED project, although his role is much more diverse than that. The Hive is a dedicated business incubation unit, with facilities for start up businesses from with Nottingham Trent University and beyond.

What makes the Hive so dynamic is the range of people and businesses it's involved with. It's a fun place to work in and do business from, but supportive too. Not all the entrepreneurs are NTU graduates, nor are they all Business Studies graduates.

We have links with many of the schools, with students from Art and Design, Infomatics (that was a new one on me when I joined NTU!) and Education to name but a few.

There are a few SPEED entrepreneurs who are reaching the end of their placement. Marc Lee http://www.eyetxt.com/ Dan Breen http://www.uni-fied.co.uk/ and Stuart Hogg http://www.sphmarketing.co.uk/ have been with us for 12 months. Luckily we won't miss them for long, as one way or another they are keeping contact with us at the Hive.

Busy times ahead

It's quite an exciting time in the Hive at the moment. There are a number of new businesses getting started, with the June HeadStart programme just beginning and a new SPEED cohort joining us. We are losing a couple though, Nik Venios and Stuart Hogg are both moving home. We'll miss them!

Phil and I are planning our SPEED seminars which start on 22nd June. Phil is really keen to get away from the blackboard and get into a dialogue, which really gets you thinking about your business. Our aim is to engage you in the process of learning about starting up a business. We won't be telling you how to do it, more helping you find out how you will approach it. At the end of the day, we want our SPEED students to learn by doing and there's no better teacher than real experience!

We still need suggestions for topics, the list so far is- finding and retaining customers, getting funding, what happens when you set up a limited company and what goes into a business plan. If you want to add to that, either contact me directly or post a comment. If we can cover it on the sessions or in the blog, we will.

Jayne

SPEED Project Stuff

Typical, get all preachy about making regular contact with people and then get too busy to practise it! Sorry.

It's been a busy few days, the end of last week saw the SPEED project at NTU being audited, which was fairly painless. Thanks to Kawsar www.digicomsolutions.com and Marc www.eyetxt.com for answering questions and standing up to a bit of stick from our visitor!

Then the bank holiday came and went with wind, rain and chilly nights. I know this because a thin piece of nylon was all that stood between me and the elements. Yes, that's right we went camping, like the fools we were. Oh , we knew the forecast, but hoped against hope that it was wrong.

Today I am putting together a project file for our local SPEED Project, not the most scintillating task, but it has to be done.

I must say I am proud of NTU's presence on the SPEED project website www.speedproject.ac.uk, our fellows directory entries look very impressive. If you feel your listing could be improved, just email me any text, images or hyperlinks that you want putting on, as I have to upload the info.

A Staffs SPEED student has posted what may be a useful link onto the message board there. you will need to log in to view the message board. I'm not going to tell you what the link is, find it yourself!

June will hopefully be a busy month, with new SPEEDsters joining us and a workshop timetable starting. We have a module on the VLP now, which I am trying to populate. Any recommended texts, websites and questions gratefully recieved. The website, VLP module, blog and facebook group http://notttr.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2535691211 will only be as useful as you make them.

Cheers

Jayne

walk to work

The next 3 weeks are Greenweeks http://www.livingfortomorrow.org.uk/greenweeks.htm/, so in honour of that, yesterday I walked in to work.

I admit, I didn't walk all of my journey as I live a fair way out, so I got my usual bus halfway and walked the rest up Mansfield Road. It was good, the sun shone and I enjoyed most of it. I have decided that I can definitely get off the bus earlier and walk through the Arboretum to the Hive.

How did I find out about this event and why did I respond? I stumbled across it first in a newspaper article and details were emailed to NTU staff about a week ago. Importantly, they both had a call to action, get off the bus and walk etc. Then on the email you could sign up and pledge your action. It got me thinking about how we reach our target market, and more importantly how we get them to act upon what they see or hear.

Reaching your target audience is hard enough. When you have reached them, how do you make sure you don't waste the opportunity if they don't buy into your product or service first time? I think the simplest way is to capture details so you can make contact with them another time, so get them to sign up to a mailing list, enter a competition, anything to keep in touch with them.

One more thing, if you say you are going to send regular updates, do! That's the other difficult bit..

What to write?

Afternoon! This blogging thing seems quite popular so I'll keep going. For the time being anyway...

Today I have been talking to Clair Hameed at Wolverhampton Uni about an FAQ list for the SPEED project website www.speedproject.ac.uk Let's keep NTU in the thick of things and get it going with some questions from the floor please.

In the meantime, let me tell you how we got here. A member of staff from the School of Education said they used a blog to keep in touch with students who are off campus on placement. Talking to folks here at the Hive and then some of you got me thinking some more.

Because I have recently had my eyes opened to blog potential, I have been exploring other people's blogs. I've been reading the TMS blog for a while, but if you are not interested in cricket, DON'T click the link http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tms/ (Maybe we can return to cricket another day, because we could be here some time and that is not what this is about.)

Those of you who came to our SPEED event on 20th April may have done a little digging about Evan Davies from Dragon's Den (at Russell's prompting) When I was doing so I found his blog on the BBC website http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/evandavis/ it makes interesting reading.

This is a link that Russell sent me http://www.youngentrepreneur.com/blog/ which might be of interest to other young entrepreneurs. I will make no age-related comment(however much you beg Stuart) Suffice to say being a young entrepreneur is mostly in the attitude. Mostly!

Okay, back to you. Please post a comment, question or whatever and let's get the ball rolling. I will work at staying on top of this, but if I fall behind, give me a nudge.
Cheers
Jayne

New to this blogging business?

Good, so am I!

I have been accused of spamming the NTU SPEED students, so have entered the murky world of blogging to keep you up to date. I get passed so much information might be useful to you, I shall be using my blog to pass it on.

Sadly, this post will be about accounting software, mostly because yours truly hosted a fabulous session on the same last week. The lovely Amanda from Flying Cows http://www.flying-cows.com/ has passed a couple of links to me that you may find useful.I haven't used them myself but Amanda uses and recommends the first two. Thanks Mandy

for invoicing and more
http://www.sidejobtrack.com/

for project planning http://www.dotproject.net/ although it seems to be offline today

this link was in an email from webpronews about client relation management http://www.vendorguru.com/The_5_Must_Have_Features_CRM_Solution.jsp?&CCID=20071742203283756&QTR=ZZf200705141302260Za20071742Zg171Zw0Zm0Zc203283756Zs5436ZZ&CLK=682070521085209511&&exp=y

For SPEED students at NTU, check out the SPEED module on the VLP SPEED0001, there's a couple of recent presentations on there.

For those of you who have forgotten what we look like, that's Phil on the left...

More soon

Jayne