Want to grow your Micro Business?
Welcome to the Micro Business Network.
If you are a small employer in Bradford and you want to develop your business, you can now benefit from the academic input, the latest management research and cutting edge learning opportunities from one of the World's leading business schools, the Bradford University School of Management.
Bradford Kickstart, in partnership with the Bradford University School of Management, has created the Micro Business Network, offering five one-day courses covering the most important elements of developing a small business:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Branding
- Finance
- Innovation
The programme is modular with one course per month over a period of five months. The programme runs a number of times a year so you don't have to worry if you have to miss a month because you can catch up at a later date.
Register for more information now!
What is the Micro Business Network?
The Micro Business Network provides a really special service which allows small businesses across Yorkshire and the North of England to access practical and solution-focused learning, tailored to the specific needs of Micro Business. It has been developed to particularly help business who want to create jobs and employment opportunities.
With unprecedented investment from the Higher Education Funding Council for England via their Economic Challenge Investment Fund (ECIF), the SME Knowledge Network are able to offer more resources to help SMEs manage through these difficult and challenging times but beyond to growth in the future. This ECIF funding has been used to create the Micro Business Network a key partnership between Bradford Kickstart and the University's SME Knowledge Network.
Courses
Course 1: Building Sales Skills
This workshop takes you from basic to advanced sales skills in the real context of your own business, helping you to work out what your business needs to grow.
It will develop your understanding of your customers' mindsets so you can get closer to them, and then manage the relationship and contact through to sale and after.
Key areas
- The psychology of selling
- Motivating and relating to customers and clients
- The power of the telephone as a sales tool
- Promoting, presenting and packaging your products and services
- Managing successful sales meetings
- Making a successful sales presentation
- Objection management
- Negotiation techniques
- Preparing a powerful proposal
- Closing the deal – techniques to increase your closure rate
Course 2: Essential Marketing
Business people need to understand their customers and build sustainable and profitable relationships with them. This workshop helps you to appreciate the difference between a product, sales and marketing led organization. It will also help you understand sources of competitive advantage, show how to segment your market, and how to use an effective "marketing mix" for long term success.
During this workshop you will learn best practice marketing, how to set marketing objectives and how to evaluate the effectiveness of your marketing techniques.
Key areas
- The real meaning of marketing
- How to create and sustain customer value through service
- Understanding customers through market segmentation and targeting
- Marketing planning
- Designing and implementing an effective marketing mix.
Course 3: Blueprint for Branding
This workshop is about discovering and putting the power of your brand at the heart of your business. This is not about logos. It's about the image and the perception of the business in the hearts and minds of customers, making the best of your brand and building your brand up from the start.
A brand can be used to protect and grow your business but it must be displayed consistently and constantly at every point those consumers touch the business. Your brand is your contract with the mind of your customers to meet their perceptions, emotions and experiences head on. Understanding or not understanding your brand properly can keep or lose customers. This workshop will help your business learn to behave more like a brand and develop and reinforce brand perceptions.
Course 4: Finance for Non-Financial Managers
In order to make better business decisions, every successful manager should understand the basics of finance and accounting, including profit and loss, calculating revenues and costs, and risk evaluation.
During this workshop your knowledge of financial management will improve and you will develop an appreciation of financial accounts, the essentials of control, risk appraisal and ultimate shareholder value.
Key areas
- Understanding and analysing the balance sheet, income statement and cash flow
- Planning and budgeting
- Cash flow and working capital management
- Understanding and managing costs
- Company valuation and creating shareholder value
Course 5 - Managing Innovation
Successful business people need to see opportunities and capture them. They need to encourage creative thinking and manage the innovation process to bring successful products and services to market ahead of the competition. This workshop will help you embrace innovation and place it at the core of what you do.
You will also learn how to eliminate the barriers to innovation, how to set an innovation agenda and start the process of developing cutting edge products and services for business growth.
Key areas
- The "innovation process"
- The four main types of innovation: product, service, process and business innovation
- Key aspects of managing innovation
- Developing winning ideas
- Building an innovative organization
- Making it happen – barriers to innovation, managing change and overcoming the barriers.
Evening Master Classes & Networking Events
Attendance at the Micro Business Network comes with free access to the SME Knowledge Network. Here we hold regular evening events and Master Classes, where you will hear from our leading academics who will provide insights into business and management topics.
These are complemented by presentations from business leaders about how it actually works in practice. We discuss the successes as well as the failures, the opportunities as well as the threats - all in a very practical manner. Advice from peers and experts can make that important difference to your organization, and these events offer great networking opportunities where you can meet other experts, businesses and local industry figures to share ideas and input – all complimented by good food and great venues.
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