Training Seminars

Governance is a critical issue for social enterprises. It is the experience of CMS that in most cases of social enterprises getting into difficulties, problems of governance are wholly or partially responsible. Many conventional sources of business advice are unfamiliar with the governance issues in social enterprises, these sources assume an owner-manager or a small number of owners.

CMS can provide expert advice on:-

• Board composition and recruitment
• Multi-stakeholder and single stakeholder boards
• Good board governance
• Board skills audit
• Developing and involving member
• Managing conflicts of interest

It is vitally important that social enterprises choose the right legal structure. The wrong legal structure can act as a drag on the business, make it difficult to involve key stakeholders, involve the business in unnecessary regulation or close off key sources of funding.

CMS is a nationally recognised expert in legal forms for social enterprise. We are a regular consultee by government on legal forms for social enterprises and have advised several hundred social enterprises on these forms. Unlike many advisors in the sector, we offer expert advice on the full range of legal forms for social enterprise:-

• Unincorporated associations
• Companies Limited by Shares or Guarantee
• Community Interest Companies ( CIC)
• Industrial and Provident Societies (IPS)
• Charities
• Limited Liability Partnerships (LLP)

At CMS we offer expert advice on legal forms for social enterprise and co-operatives so call for chat …

CMS have a wide range of skills to support your business in the area of marketing and promotion.

From Consultancy

If you are thinking of starting a business, you are an existing social enterprise or new / existing Cooperative we have a range of services that can help your business reach the next level and enable you to be ahead of the rest.

From one to one and one to many bespoke training sessions – planning events and seminars

The range of advice which you may wish to work with us;

• Market research – supporting you to design questionnaires, customer needs analysis and evaluation techniques
• Branding – designing logos and business stationary
• Image - creating your unique identity, business names and strap lines
• Promotional material - flyers, posters folders, newsletters and all types of merchandise
• Selling - designing scripts strategies, letters and role play
• News release – design and distribution of your goods and service
• Strategic planning – a range of short, medium and long term marketing campaigns.

With over 15 years experience we have a wide range of expertise from observational marketing, business planning and business marketing strategy, market research and growth planning,

We are specialists in producing business and marketing strategy plans which have directly resulted in some businesses increasing by 55% over a twelve month period.

Designing flyers for a direct mail shot (6 & 8%) return, the national average being 1.4%

We believe in helping you help yourselves to achieve your potential and make your business professional and sustainable. Most importantly we always support you in a way that best suits your needs.

Call for a chat as we at CMS can support you to grow your business …..

Planning for business success

Business planning allows your social enterprise to create a focus for the direction of the business and provides targets that will it grow. It will also give you the opportunity to stand back and review your performance and the factors affecting your business.

Business planning can provide:

• Greater ability to make continual improvements and anticipate problems
• Sound financial information on which to base decisions
• Improved clarity and focus approach
• Confidence in your decision-making

Other things to consider,as you are running a business, as it’s easy to get bogged down in day-to-day problems and forget the bigger picture. However, successful businesses invest time to create and manage budgets, prepare and review business plans and regularly monitor finance and performance.

Having structured planning processes in place can make all the difference to the growth of your business. It will enable you to concentrate resources on improving profits, reducing costs and increasing social and investment returns.

CMS have a range of skills to help you plan so call us for a advice …..

We have experience of assisting organisations to monitor their financial performance. This includes developing bookkeeping systems and using software such as excel, sage, microsoft accounts and kashflow.

“Staying Solvent … Staying Legal” seminar and networking events.

Held at three different social enterprises – Centre 47 Carlisle, South Lakes Society for the Blind and the Kirkgate Community Arts Centre.

Staff from the host social enterprises gave really informative, inspiring ‘warts and all’ guided tours of their social enterprise.

This friendly relaxed atmosphere encouraged a lively exchange of ideas and good practice between the visitors and hosts.

After the tour Dave Hollings from CMS told the audience about recent changes to Company Law.

Bill Knowles of SECOD gave a presentation on how to stay solvent in these difficult times.

These events were organised by SECOD /CMS and Wingspan in consortium on behalf of CSEP in Cumbria over 2007, 2008 and 2009 .

If you want to talk about CMS runinng similar events/training, give us a call at CMS……..

The training that Anne gave us was related to marketing. We were very pleased with the quality and delivery of this training.

Upon returning to our workplace we embarked on a marketing plan, applying the principles that Anne taught, the results were very good.

We now have a specialist marketing person within our organisation who has many years experience within private sector marketing. He looked at the methods we used to compile our marketing plan, was very impressed and commented that these were the ones he himself would employ.

Mark Douglas

Anchor Staying Put (Cumbria)

Background

In May 2003 the North West Development Agency completed a survey of social enterprises in Cumbria. The objectives of this survey were to:

• complete a practical survey of social enterprises within Cumbria
• identify gaps and barriers in the provision of support to social enterprises in Cumbria
• inform a full co-ordinated programme of proposals with partners and social enterprise support agencies for overcoming barriers or filling gaps in support provision

The North West Development Agency announced that funding would be made available to support the social enterprise section in the four sub-regions of Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Cumbria and Cheshire. Social enterprises and community businesses were seen by the North West Development Agency as offering “an alternative model for expanding economic activity whilst securing social gains and building community capacity” and recognised the sub-regional Social Enterprise Partnerships as key organisations in delivering those aims.

The Cumbria Social Enterprise Partnership

This strategy for the Partnership was developed by the Cumbria Social Enterprise Steering Group, a partnership of Cumbrian social enterprises, development trusts, support agencies, local government, urban and rural regeneration companies to other stakeholders. The strategy is aimed at growing and strengthening a dynamic and sustainable social enterprise sector and to help to create an inclusive and growing Cumbrian economy.

The Action Plan was developed over an eighteen month period by the Cumbria Social Enterprise Partnership and set out to co-ordinate the efforts of all partners in Cumbria supporting Social enterprises and to allocate the available resources to maximum effect. This is implemented and managed by the Cumbria Social Enterprise Steering Group with the North Pennines Heritage Trust acting as the accountable body.

To join contact: [email protected]