Gorey Chamber, Gorey Credit Union and Wexford County Enterprise Board invites you to the launch of the Small Business Support Loan Scheme.
The launch will be held at Gorey Credit Union, McDermott Street on Tuesday the 12th April @ 7.30pm.
Feb 242011
Why not forget about the election for a few hours and come down to the Ashdown Park Hotel in Gorey from 6pm where the local chapter of BNI have a Business Expo and are hosting a Dragon’s Den type competition with a €10,000 prize fund.
While all the hype and attention is on politics, we all know that the people who are going to get Ireland out of the recession are the Small and Medium Sized business owners. In an effort to promote and highlight businesses in Wexford and Wicklow the local chapter of BNI are running a Dragon’s Den type competition with a prize fund of €10,000 available for the winning Start-up Business.
So why not come down to the Ashdown Park Hotel this evening (Thurs 24th Feb) from 6pm and meet like minded business owners with a positive outlook. (Dragon’s Den competition starts at 8pm).
I came across and advertisement today by eircom for their Online Software or Software as a Service. While I along with others may have issues with eircom’s monopoly position in the Irish Telecommunications Infrastructure Market, Software as a Service (SaaS) is something that SME Businesses should be evaluating.
When your business is small and you are starting off in business it is very easy to keep track of all your communications with your clients and for that matter communications between employees, but as you grow and start to expand your business that’s not so easy any more. That’s when some things start to fall through the cracks and you don’t keep in contact with your customers quite so often. Studies have shown that the main reason customers stop doing business with you is that they perceive that you don’t care or don’t value their business.
This is where a good CRM (Customer Relationship Marketing) system comes in. A good CRM system will allow everyone in your organisation too maintain those contacts with your customers and not only retain customers but grow the business.
Similarly in these recession times your employees can be spread much thinner on the ground and particularly if you have people on the road it’s difficult to work as a cohesive team and get that pool of knowledge and skills to be passed around between employees. That’s where good collaborative software can really help.
Unfortunately both CRM and Collaborative software systems can require significant amounts of IT and computer infrastructure to run effectively and apart from the capital costs to install them these systems, they require expertise in terms of IT Personnel to keep them running efficiently. That means extra recurring costs that your business can ill afford at this time.
But there is an potential answer, Software as a Service or to put it another way rent the software . That way all those complicated bits like servers, firewalls, networks, ups, databases, backups and the IT people to keep it all running smoothly are in a hi-tech data center and all you need is remote access via a broadband connection. From a business and budgeting point of view you don’t have any capital outlay and have predictable monthly costs.
It is these things that can give you the edge over your competitors in tough times.
For Business Broadband in Gorey and North Wexford check out Alpha Broadband
I attended a Business Advice Evening yesterday in the Ashdown Park Hotel run by Bank of Ireland Gorey, Gorey Chamber of Commerce and Wexford County Enterprise Board. It featured speakers from the SFA, Islandbridge, Action Coach and Bank of Ireland’s Enterprise Builder. Each speaker spoke for ten minutes and concentrated on giving simple, practical advice that could be easily implemented by any business.
Well done to all concerned, great content, great format and plenty of networking opportunities.
Came across a new Irish website aimed at helping people who are starting their own business. While there are a lot of resources on the internet to help people who are thinking of starting their own business, this site is written form an Irish perspective, has links to the County Enterprise Boards and is done by the same people who do siliconrepublic.com. Worth having a look at.
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