Entrepreneur Award winners in Banbury

On the last Thursday of every month, since July 2021, I've held a business growth evening in Banbury as an Ambassador for the Entrepreneurs Circle. The Entrepreneurs Circle is a membership organisation that I've personally been part of for over 10 years. They exist to educate, motivate, help and inspire business owners to achieve more than they ever thought possible.

Each month I lead our Banbury meeting through a workbook provided by the team at the EC, which focuses on sales & marketing strategies to help grow any business. And each month we award one person as our Entrepreneur of the Month.

We were spoilt for choice for our award winner at our November 2022 local meeting in Banbury. The sharing of successes section of the meeting is my favourite part of all our meetings - this is where we go 'round the room and anyone who wants to will share some of their recent successes with the group.

Hearing what’s working well & getting results for people in their businesses, is both inspirational and heart-warming. It's also a great opportunity to focus on the positive for a change.

When do you get chance to celebrate what’s working well in your business? When do you get asked to focus on your recent successes and share some highlights? How often do you share with other people what's going really well in your life or your business? (Give it a try - you'll soon see the benefits!)

It’s such a helpful exercise for all of us. It’s too easy to only focus on what’s not working and what we’ve yet to do, but taking some time each month to think about what is working well & share details with others, is the pat on the back we all deserve for a job well done.

Anyway, back to our November meeting... Have you, or has anyone in your business, ever given up on finding software solutions to advance & automate parts of your business because of all the previous failed attempts? Have you ever felt stuck and resorted to doing things the slow, manual way, because that’s the only way you can be certain of getting accurate results?

I’m sure this is a common thing in a lot of businesses. It certainly was for one of Naomi Coe’s clients, whose bookkeeper had decided there was no other way of managing Company expenses and getting accurate results, other than to do it the manual way with paper receipts & physical record-keeping. Which is why when Naomi was tasked to suggest & implement a better solution - using software solutions - she was going to have to win hearts & minds to move people to consider her alternatives.

Which is exactly what she managed to do, as she proposed and trained this business on the use of Pleo. A digital tool for improving and speeding up expense management. Naomi shared how the person responsible for bookkeeping has since said to her how much easier this part of her job is now and how grateful she is to Naomi for her help.

As this was the second time of us hearing about Naomi making people's lives & businesses better as part of her service from her business Coellaborations, we felt this deserved recognition, so we crowned Naomi our Entrepreneur of the Month for November 2022.

After every monthly meeting I write a short article for the Entrepreneurs Circle which is included as an insert in their monthly magazine, The Circular, which gets distributed to all members of the EC. Members local to Banbury will receive my insert in their copy of the magazine to see what's going on at their local meeting.

If you want to hear more success stories and learn how to implement more great marketing strategies that work, perhaps you'd consider coming along to one of our next meetings? As I said at the beginning, they take place on the last Thursday of every month, and they're already scheduled for every month in 2023.

If you're looking for help growing your business in 2023, whether you're the business owner, a leader within a business, or you just want to improve your own business skills & experience, I'd highly recommend you consider becoming a member of the Entrepreneurs Circle. You can find out more and sign-up for a free trial here.

I look forward to sharing stories of our future winners here on LinkedIn.