I have more than 25 years’ experience of working within enterprise development. Seeing the potential of enterprise to positively change peoples’ lives, I established People Into Enterprise Ltd (PIE) in 2002. This enterprise has animated several thousand latent entrepreneurs by helping them to recognise and exploit their enterprise talents. My specialisms are entrepreneurship and enterprise skills development, innovation and ideas generation, stakeholder engagement, business start-up, growth, women’s entrepreneurship, the creative/cultural sector, engaging hard to reach groups in entrepreneurship, facilitating connectivity and new venture creation. I design and deliver entrepreneurship programmes to support social and economic regeneration and enterprise development. The success of my work is founded on my innovative approach to engaging with people who are detached from the labour market or isolated from conventional business support networks. I have worked with targeted audiences including women, the BAME community, refuges and asylum seekers, people living in isolated rural communities, and people who are disabled, homeless or living in disadvantaged communities. I use diagnostic tools and business models which incorporate concepts and techniques with which people are comfortable, including storyboarding, use of metaphor and mind mapping. I enable participants to review their aspirations for growth and start to identify the opportunities and routes to market that support them in achieving commercial and creative success. I lead Create North, a business development platform which aims to maintain access to commercial opportunities for creative practitioners deriving from the work of major heritage/arts venues. I work with a school for children with special needs to lead SENhub, a social enterprise which offers specialised teacher training programmes and professional development support to educational practitioners and carers working with children with multiple and profound learning disabilities.
Listed skills include Entrepreneurship, Business Planning, Training, Business Development, and 27 others.
