SocEntEastMids offers potential community enterprise and social business start-ups the following support.
- We make no charge for the services below. We are happy sharing our thirty years of Partnership community development and social enterprise experience.
Our support list is not exhaustive. Every project we work with is unique. You have, as a community group, expertise in your existing people, maybe you need advice to fill some knowledge gaps?
As an individual, with a passion to support your community, you need to know the very basic first steps in ethical business formation?
As an existing group, maybe you need support for marketing ideas, convincing the community of your project worth or in engaging wider partnerships?
We don’t believe that advice, free advice, should be a will-o-the-wisp creature, leading to mythical outcomes. Our philosophy is to echo the sentiments of Maya Angelou – ‘…try to be a rainbow in someone’s cloud.‘ A much better goal to strive for!
We tender free, non-judgemental, empathetic advice, based on our collective experience, to help you plant those early stage seeds for your community enterprise journey.
Ideas testing and resolving the project landscape:
- Exploring first steps and basic enterprise ideas!
- Governance types, business models, volunteers, customers – what will it all look like?
- What policies will we need?
- Identifying useful partners and service providers for our journey
Mentoring and critical friend support
- How is our journey developing?
- Is it turning out as we planned? Do we need to ‘pivot’ our enterprise?
- Is our planned balance of earned income and grant funding right/well considered?
Building the business plan
- I can’t do ‘spreadsheets’. Help!
- What is an invoice?
- What should our back-office system look like at this stage?
- What wider professional support will we need…banking, accountancy etc?
- What will it all cost?
A clear and simple web site for you and your project
- We donate, design and build your secure and appropriate ‘seed-bed’ web presence.
- Be on-line for your funders, partners, volunteers or customers from day one! (mycommunityenterprise.com?)
- If you had a simple website, like the one you are now reading, would it transform how you, others and community partners saw your developmental business journey?
- Webmail addresses for your community enterprise, individual project participants or for dedicated campaigns. (e.g. susie@mycommunityenterprise.com?, admin@mycommunity enterprise.com?, donate@mycommunityenterprise.com?)
- We offer ongoing technical support – maintaining your domain, content creation , software updates and security.
SocEntEastMids is a member of the SmithMartin LLP social business family of projects. You can see our Partner resources and activities here.
Our road-map for SocEntEastMids
- To locate and open an office in our six-counties area – helping with access to our services and support.
- To extend our development offer for training and coaching seminars – to help extend early ‘seed-bed’ provision within communities, helping you grow in your landscape.
- To develop and flex our own business strategy, in a way that will enable us to fund micro-donations to every ‘seed-bed’ client – maybe help with research, computing equipment or some other developmental start-up activity – drawn from and supporting your early phase business planning or project ideas.
