From their website:
About Enterprising Women
At Enterprising Women, our goal is to help women achieve the success they want, by empowering, connecting, training, inspiring, campaigning, promoting, celebrating and supporting them in whatever way we can. We warmly welcome all female business owners, new and well-established, from any sector, background and from all parts of the UK.
What makes Enterprising Women different?
Founded by Bev Hurley, C.B.E., we launched in 2006 with a brand new approach, centering on the concept of building a supportive community, and advancing women’s enterprise through providing support at all stages of the business journey, including growth – a novelty then, when all the focus was on pre- and start-up. We transformed the support landscape for women, starting in the East of England with funding from the Regional Development agency.
Other unique attributes were the 100% focus on being led by the needs of the women we served, our own significant first-hand experience of the highs and lows of running our own successful businesses, and a passion for wanting to share our skills and knowledge in a creative, collaborative and supportive environment and enable others to do so to.
Finally, all our high quality, real-world training courses are not only delivered at female-friendly times and locations, but are designed both to extend functional business skills and learning at the same time as developing women’s management and leadership skills. We believe you can best grow a successful business by growing your personal skills in tandem – and that we can all learn from each other.
In 2010, we established Enterprising Women as a not-for-profit company. We’ve seen too many businesswomen be turned off by hard telesales calls, high membership prices delivering little value, and expensive, unsustainable franchise deals; being not-for-profit is is a really important part of our ethos. In tough economic times, our members need to know and trust that we’re doing everything we can to increase value to them, not to us.
We’re grateful that many of our speakers and workshop hosts do not charge fees, but give a little of their time, inspiration and expertise back to help others.
Enterprising Women Today
Our community grew rapidly across the East and South of England through word of mouth referrals, and now reaches over 45,000 women across the UK. We’ve picked up prestigious awards and commendations along the way, including UK Government and European Best Practice for SME and gender support, but the thing we value most is our high levels of member satisfaction and hearing about their successes.
We continually invest in developing and evolving new business services. We’re now building our network of Business Clubs through our volunteer hosts, who provide that all important face to face local contact each month. At the same time, we’re increasing our strategic partnerships around the world to help members who are looking to trade internationally, and developing our corporate partnerships to enable us to bring funded or subsidised services to our members.
There’s much, much more in the pipeline – we hope you will join us, share your expertise with us and the community, and learn and grow from what it can give you in return. Together, we can really make things happen!