Want to Grow your Business?

New ideas are important in helping to keep your social enterprise or coop fresh.

It is good, every so often, to hold a creative session where you can think of new ways to target existing clients/customers and generate new ones, or just explore better ways of doing things. Businesses that do not keep an eye on the market trends can end up losing ground or being tired and boring.

It is important to stay ‘in touch’ and fresh ideas can help reposition your business in an over crowded market. We try at CMS to encourage our clients to look at whether there’s a more innovated way to delivering their product services, or how they might improve it….

Looking at potential new markets, areas to move into, new business opportunities, or even diversifying into new areas of business.

Call for advice to plan for a better furture…

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 …..

For so many social enterprises and small to medium-sized businesses (SMEs), providing high-quality,cost-effective training and development can be difficult due to the pressures of time and money.We have found this can be a real issue to our clients as training can be a distraction;

According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD), training is often seen as a distraction from the day-to-day running of the business and attention to areas such as people management can be squeezed by work pressures. Its survey, ‘Who Learns At Work’, found that staff at small businesses are more likely to feel they are offered insufficient training opportunities than those in larger firms.

According to the CIPD, one of the main reasons for staff leaving a company is the lack of development or career opportunities. Training and learning is no longer seen as something that is done for employees by the business, it is something staff members look for to increase their employability.

There is very wide range of good training programmes available and we try to support social enterprise to choose which options are most suitable for their company, which as such can be something of a minefield. But with the growth of mobile technologies and the internet, there are many different ways you can deliver training to your staff — the majority of choices come in the form of on-the-job training, external courses and coaching and mentoring.

We can help you help your staff to grow, so why not call us for a chat about support for you and your team ……..

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 has experience of assisting clients with expansion plans.

If you seek to grow your business, you might need a greater working capital requirement and/or some capital investment. We have a good knowledge of funding regimes and relationships with providers of loan finance.

In particular we understand their requirements and can help you fulfil them.

In September 2006, at a chance meeting at Ewanrigg, Garath Nash and Anne Sowerby told me of the services that CMS offered, that was a turning point within our organisation. With Anne’s boundless energy and knowledge she helped us gain a grant of £7000 for marketing and advice on how to re-brand ourselves, and we had business plan training with Janice Parker, which helped us focus on which way we needed to go in order to grow successfully.

Anne subsequently helped us to follow the plan, since then we have moved to premises just off Maryport High Street .We even won an award for our growth (that being 150% overall) We set up the Junior savers and now have 4 successful schools running . In September 2006 we had a membership of 140 Adults - in July 2009, we now have 385 Adults and 116 Junior members totalling 510, with a large percentage active. This has by far exceeded our predicted growth set out within our business plan.

CMS enabled us to realise our strengths, and business development and encouraged us to our goal of being self sustainable.

Justine Lewis

Development and Marketing Officer

Working with CMS via business suport, advice mentoring and Business Planning has greatly strengthened our credit union. CMS have proven time and time again to be an excellent resource from which our credit union has gained valuable information and advice, in particular marketing, raising awarness of the key benefits of our organisation via very successful campaings – R U SKINT and Red Roor, with a return rate of approx 8%. Overall profitability and membership has increased as a direct result of the support.

Hospice at Home West Cumbria wanted to open a charity shop in Workington, in a town centre location. We wanted the unit to be well fitted out and run by a paid manager. To achieve this was obviously going to be a significant capital investment, and we had little experience of how much money such a shop was going to take. Our Trustees were unwilling to put so much of the charity’s money at risk and the project would not have gone ahead without external support.

The Hub provided a number of things that were essential to the project:

• £15,000 grant aid to cover the fitting out and opening costs.
• Advice on other funders, and an introduction to staff in Cumbria County Council’s Economic Development Unit who were our other funder.
• Advice on the setting up and running of the shop
• Practical help setting up a trading company to run the shop and our other trading activities.
• Providing a mentoring visit from Murray Winter, who had vast experience of running Oxfam’s charity shops.

Some of the above we knew that we needed. Some things like the mentoring visit were things that we weren’t asking for and didn’t think we needed but were immensely valuable.

In addition we knew that the Hub were always there if we needed further help and advice.

Bob Barnby

Fundraising Manager

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

West Cumbria Hospice at Home

Presentation of Hub grant for Charity shop in Workington town Centre in Cumbria by Bob Barnby.

> Download Bobs presentation