Last week I spent two whole days at the Macdonald Linden Hall Hotel & Golf Club. Alright for some you may think! This was all part and parcel of me attending the Business Northumberland “Business Boom” Event. What this event has made me realise and appreciate is that sometimes you can just be too busy working in your business to concentrate on growth plans, what your goals are and how you are going to achieve them.

The fantastic trainers from Business Northumberland (Digital Sparkles, Hypestar, Enterprise Made Simple amongst others) really reinforced what we should be doing as small business owners to get our businesses to the next level and grow rather than just dealing with the day to day operation of our business. I am looking forward to putting lots of ideas in to place over the coming weeks and months, not only for my business but there were lots of tips and advice which I can use for my clients too. We learnt how social media can be utilised to reach potential clients and customers, the example from the event was that a hashtag #BNBoom had a reach of over half a million people during the 2 days – if that could be harnessed for small businesses in the area the impact on growth would be huge.

There were 85 businesses represented at this event which meant that in those all important tea breaks and lunch times you had the opportunity to learn about other businesses in Northumberland and do as much networking as you wanted to. How often do you get the chance to have 85 business owners in one place together?

One of the best things, which I should have mentioned earlier was that the two days of training were completely fully funded – that’s 12 hours of training and networking which I didn’t need to pay a penny for, how lucky am I?! Once the event was over the support doesn’t stop there as there is a whole load of information and tools to help businesses on the Business Northumberland site, so I’ll be off there shortly to see what I need to be doing to achieve the goals I  have set myself.

The feedback from all those who attended was fantastic and as a result Business Northumberland will be looking to hold a similar event next year for another batch of businesses looking to grow and develop.

You can find out more about the fantastic Business Northumberland team on their website.