Whether it’s a beer garden bumble or a full blown outdoor extravaganza, there’s something about summer in Norfolk that makes you want to get exploring the opportunities to take work…and marketing for that matter, outside. With so many fantastic examples of events leveraging the outdoors as their energizing venue from the Norfolk Show to Norfolk Enterprise Festival, to Fresher than a Fayre, we’ve extended our range of outdoor products ready for the summer events season.
We’re committed to quality and recently launched our campaign for better portables, which we have considered in our choice of outdoor products. So if you or your business are looking to take events outside, there’s more to us than meets the eye and we’re always on hand to offer no obligation advice on getting the most of outdoor events as well as offering a full design, management and production service for all your further needs.
If you’re looking to plan your own outdoor event or have a product in mind, get in touch today to ask how we could help.
It was only a few weeks ago that I set up East Lodge Consulting Ltd and I have been busy networking and starting professional relationships with business owners across the region. Some time ago, I was advised to broaden my activities with one or two side hustles. So, I’ve also been pursuing one of my pipe dreams as well as establishing my consultancy business. This looks like it might turn into something fantastic – a supersized side hustle.
Chasing your dreams can sometimes feel like a fool’s errand. When I completed my first novel, There There My Dear, a few years ago I dreamt that it would launch my career as a novelist. I was certain that my book would be snapped up by a publisher and that it would rise to the top of the best-sellers list in no time.
Then came the rejection letters and emails from literary agents who wrote that they loved the book but would not be looking to represent me. This happened time after time and chasing my dream turned into something of a nightmare.
About a year ago I decided to write the sequel to There There My Dear. Looking back I don’t know if there was any logic behind the decision, I just knew I had to do it. In the autumn of 2018 I was wondering what to do with the whole writing dream, and I asked a few friends if they knew anybody in the literary world. After all, there’s no harm in asking, and our networks are often larger than we imagine.
To cut a long story short, I am now speaking with an agent about There There My Dear, the sequel and the final book in the trilogy. He loves the story, the characters and my writing style. The next step is for my agent to bring on board a publisher – I am so excited!
This all goes to show that chasing your dreams, listening to good advice and involving your network can bring great results!
Norfolk’s Chamber’s Young Chamber initiative aims to bridge the gap between business and young people. As part of this work we are looking to support City College Norwich students to engage with their local business community.
The third year Business Administration Degree students at CCN are currently working on a module call ‘Creative Enterprise’. Their degree will be validated by the University of East Anglia and the ‘Creative Enterprise’ module is all about finding creative solutions to business problems. The students are looking for Norfolk businesses to work with them and set them real-life, real-time challenges.
Commenting on the call to find businesses to work with the students, Ernst Schute, Lecturer at the School of HE at City College Norwich said: “We would welcome the input from the Norfolk business community and it would be much more interesting for the students to work in a real life context. Whether your problem is small or large the students want to hear from you.”
To find out how your business can get involved, please contact: Nova Fairbank on 01603 729 713 or email: nova.fairbank@norfolkchamber.co.uk.
Freebridge is once again inviting applications to their Community Fund, with £5000 being made available to local community groups and charities.
The housing provider’s annual fund gives local groups the opportunity to apply for grants of up to £1000 to support community and voluntary activities that meet the needs of the community within West Norfolk.
Applications are welcome from groups whose aims include:
Promoting health and wellbeing;
Tackling disadvantage;
Supporting local solutions to local needs;
Promoting community cohesion;
Developing sustainable and supportive communities, and
Improving the environment.
Last year among the successful applicants to the £5000 fund were 4 Transform, Age UK Norfolk, the Hanseatic Union, the King’s Lynn Men’s Shed, Sing Your Heart Out, South West Norfolk Youth Opportunities Project and The Garage Trust Ltd. The allocation of the money available is decided by a panel made up of Freebridge employees and members from their Tenant Panel.
Freebridge Director of Housing, Robert Clarke, said: “Freebridge is committed to supporting community groups and the work they do across our region and through our fund we can provide financial help to projects and initiatives that are making a real difference to people’s lives and helping to support a better West Norfolk.”
Employers urged to get second hand machinery inspected following death
A routine safety inspection could have prevented the death of James Criddle, 29, who suffocated when his clothes became caught in the screener machine, purchased on eBay and missing its safety guards, in May 2017. His employer, Robert Baldwin, of Baldwin Skip Hire in Norfolk, was cleared by a jury at Norwich Crown Court of manslaughter, but found guilty at Norwich Crown Court of neglect in failing to discharge a duty.
Gavin Dearsley, Risk Management Advisor at Alan Boswell Risk Management (ABRM), said the tragic accident was entirely avoidable had the correct health and safety procedures been followed. “Sadly, accidents like this happen more regularly than they should,” he added. “Financial pressures in the business world often lead to companies trying to find ways of saving money by buying machinery that isn’t new, and therefore not built to modern design standards. As we’ve seen, the implications of that, and of then not having a health and safety inspection, can lead to tragic consequences.”
Mr Criddle was operating the £18,000 screener machine, which sorts material of different sizes and includes a cylindrical drum, when the absence of safety guards caused his clothes to become caught. He died from suffocation, just five days after the machine had been brought to the skip hire site. In his defence, Baldwin said it was “not obvious” that the machine was missing vital safety equipment.
Make sure your equipment is safe
But that misses the point, as under the Provision and Use of Work Equipment Regulations (PUWER) – the UK implementation of the European Work Equipment Directive – the law requires employers to ensure all equipment is safe for use, and that full training is given to employees. In other words, even if employers think second hand equipment looks safe, they have a legal duty to ensure that it is.
“For us, with a trained eye looking at it, it would have been obviously unsafe,” said Mr Dearsley. “It’s incredibly sad to see this because I know that if we had been out to see that machine before it was used we could have stopped it happening. There is obviously a cost involved, but you can’t put a price on someone’s life. Often they have no instruction manuals, no warranties, and they have issues, whether it’s missing guards or faulty e-stops on electrical machinery.”
He added that, while the “gold standard” would be for engineering and manufacturing companies to only use modern equipment built to European standards and CE marked, such a scenario is economically unrealistic. “It’s completely unreasonable to expect everyone to be able to keep buying new equipment, so it’ll never happen, and you can get some really good second hand equipment that’s built fantastically well,” he said. “But the law requires employers to do a risk assessment of the machinery, and that’s where we can make a real difference.”
Costs for machinery risk assessments will vary depending on the number of machines and the time taken, but could be as little as a few hundred pounds.
Alan Boswell Risk Management can help
If you have questions about your existing equipment, want advice before purchasing something new, or want a full health & safety audif for your business, Alan Boswell Risk Management can help. Based in Norwich and operating across the country, our experts work with companies in a wide variety of industries.
To find out more, give our risk management team a call on 01603 967900.
Whether you have an office full of hayfever sufferers, or you and your family suffer from this annual problem, you may not immediately think of blinds as a solution. However, Louvolite, one of our fabric suppliers, has created Pollergen™ – a unique fabric treatment that has the Allergy UK seal of approval.
Pollergen™ treated fabrics contain an active ingredient that captures and then neutralises the pollen, thereby helping to reduce the effects of hayfever. All Pollergen™ fabrics can be washed or wiped down with little effect on the pollen reducing qualities. This is because the active formulation continuously migrates to the surface of the fabric, providing many years of protection. Norwich Sunblinds make bespoke blinds for homes and offices, and Pollergen™is just one of the options available. If you are looking for commercial blinds, we can also help you with other options such as antibacterial and antifungal finishes, solar protection and anti-glare coatings, and we can ensure that your blinds are fire-retardant. We’ll visit you to chat through your needs and to take measurements. We can also help with extra large or unusual shaped windows in commercial buildings.
Ever wondered whether TV advertising is still important, and how it’s adapted over the years? Here’s a great podcast with the MD of JMS Group Francesca de Lacey based at Hethersett just outside Norwich. JMS are leaders in the field of TV advert creation, working with leading brands to create imaginative capmapigns that deliver. They don’t just create TV adverts, but anything to do with media in their purpsoe built studios and they have a fascinating history.
More than a business park, King’s Lynn Enterprise Park is a dynamic hub designed for high-growth industries, collaboration, and sustainable living.
Set in a scenic riverside location with seamless regional and global connectivity, our 15-hectare site offers ready-to- develop plots within a thriving enterprise zone. Backed by government investment and integrated into a growing community, we provide businesses with the space, support, and infrastructure to shape the future of the region.
If you are among the business owners who are worried about the strategies that can help your business get well-known enough that people know about your product, you do not need to worry anymore. There is a technique through which a lot of small businesses have got an advertising benefit as well.
That is a technique known as pay per click advertising. There are a lot of companies in the business world that utilise this form of marketing. If you look on Gogle alone and simply search for ‘specialist PPC agency in London‘ you will find countless companies. There are a lot of benefits of a PPC agency.
PPC boosts the traffic on your website
If you have spent a lot of time creating an attractive and user-friendly website, but no one knows about it, what benefits are you getting out of it?
It is always better to use the techniques employed by a PPC agency, and that is that the paid advertisement of your company would appear on the very first page that you open on the search engine and that is how people will get to know about your website. The more the traffic is on your website, the greater the chances that someone will purchase the product that you offer.
You only pay for clicks
PPC is a cost-effective marketing technique as you do not have to pay for anything unless someone clicks on the ad. When someone does so, it means that the ad is getting a degree of recognition and therefore so is your company.
Not difficult to produce
It is not difficult to have a PPC ad per se. You can make it yourself or even hire a professional to make it. And with the time you can have that ad running, that too is not a lot of time.
You can analyse the performance in real-time
With other marketing strategies, the results are unknown until the marketing strategies are applied and the work has been ongoing for some time. However, in the case of PPC advertising, everything happens and runs in real-time, from the number of clicks to all other real-time data. That is better for a small company so that one can easily analyse how the company is performing and if they need to improve their methods in advertising or to get people as their loyal customers.
At the 54 hour hackathon that is Sync The City, in 2017 Callum Coombes and his colleagues won with their brilliant concept to protect lone workers. They won because of a solid business case, having spotted a gap in the market with clever use of technology. It’s one thing winning a competition, however hard that may be, but another altogether to actually bring their concept to market. The key question was is there a market in the gap they had identified?
Hear their journey here in this insightful podcast. The lessons learnt, how they operate as a team, what they would do differently if starting again.
Crucially in less than two years, they have a fully functioning product and proposition – ready to launch to the world!
Yesterday I went on a trip with the Norfolk Chambers of Commerce. It was a backstage tour of the Theatre Royal in Norwich. It was absolutely fascinating.
It’s great to see the auditorium and look it out from the stage and see what the actors see. But the most fascinating part of the visit was going backstage.
It was extraordinary how big the theater was behind the scenes. The stage is actually a tiny part of it, and the auditorium is not much bigger. But backstage is absolutely massive. It is a rabbit warren of dressing rooms, star dressing rooms, wardrobe rooms, props rooms, a long line of pulleys that make all the scenery and the curtains work, everything. It was enormous.
This got me thinking about us at LiveLink. We are the backstage of the theater. We’re pulling up the curtains, moving the props, making sure everything is ready for the actors to do their job. Our clients may be the star, they may be working in the clinic, or running their hotel. They are the ones that are showing off at the front. They’re the star. They’re the person in the spotlight. Whereas, we’re the people pulling on the pulleys behind them. Getting all their bits to work so that they can do their job.
We’re answering the telephone calls; we’re speaking to the clients. We’re listening to all their woes and worries and concerns when they’re calling, so that our client can just be this very big smiley person at the front with the big arms open wide, saying “Welcome”.
Everyone needs someone to shift the scenery. Who moves yours?
It will not come as a surprise to you that the customer reviews are integral to any business.
But do you know why?
Customer reviews help to refine the ‘customer experience’. As a business that is built upon respect, knowledge and passion, it is in Chatsbrook’s nature to prioritise our clients over the revenue we receive. What this means for a customer-centric business, is that we wish to make every point of contact outstanding to our clients – from the initial enquiry to the delivery of your asset(s).
Harnessing customer reviews helps us to analyse and review the service that you receive as well as to celebrate the parts you enjoyed! For instance, we have recognised that many of our clients were impressed by our timeliness, transparency and friendliness.
Our mission is to provide a reliable and trustworthy service to everyone. We want potential clients to feel how much we care about our ‘customer experience’ through the online reviews.
Chatsbrook would like you to know that it is worth putting your trust in us.
The ‘customer experience’ at Chatsbrook has been modelled by what we, ourselves, expect from other services. We expect businesses will communicate efficiently, respect us and understand our needs. Chatsbrook is no exception to this. It is our pleasure to serve you, which is why from the offset we make it our mission to understand you and your needs. Our team, out of courtesy, make a continual effort to keep you up to date during every stage of the process- so you don’t have to worry.
Online reviews are often used to consolidate our ethos to employees we train. Chatsbrook value our testimonials so much so, that they are used as the standard of how we interact with our clients. Since the beginning of the business over two years ago, we have yet to receive a bad review. If we were ever to, we would treat that client with the same level of respect as we treat any other client. We welcome honest feedback as it could present a learning curve -of which future clients would benefit from. It is important for all businesses to recognise the importance of the ‘customer experience’ because there is always room for improvement.
If you wish to tell us your experience of Chatsbrook, or if you would like to view our reviews for yourself follow @Chatsbrook on Facebook. Alternatively, you can read our Google reviews if you simply type ‘Chatsbrook’ into Google.