Events

As a business owner, you need an accountant who does more than manage numbers. A good accountant adds value with financial insights, aiding decisions, streamlining processes, and ensuring compliance.

As a business owner, you will have many important relationships that determines the success of your venture – from your customers to your suppliers. Amongst the most important is the relationship with your accountant. More than just someone who “looks after the numbers”, a good accountant can add a huge amount of value to your business – providing crucial financial insights to help inform key strategic decisions.

However, the value of an accountant is not always fully maximised. Despite having a detailed understanding of your financial position and operational strengths, many business owners fail to tap into these all-important insights. It’s a missed opportunity. We’re going to look at some of the ways an accountant can add value to your business – and how to maximise the relationship, streamline your accounting processes and ensure you meet deadlines and compliance duties.

This course will cover topics such as:

• To ask what do you need to know from your accountant.
• Decisions you need to make.
• What’s the difference between a bookkeeper and an accountant.
• What you should be doing.
• And what you shouldn’t be asking.
• The cost of not working in partnership.
• What do you want to do and what do you want someone else to do.
• How to make the relationship with your accountant more profitable.

To book a place, click here.

Enabling your business to be more successful and spot gaps in the market.

Customers needs and wants change over time the potential demand for a product or service that is not being met. By identifying the needs of customers through market research, businesses are able to reduce the level of risk and make business decisions that are more likely to e successful. This webinar will provide you with an overview of the essential processes and tools to undertake market research enabling you to make better decisions for the development of new or improved products and services.

To book a place, click here.

Email marketing is one of the most effective channels to engage with your audience. This session will help you create and implement an email marketing strategy using MailChimp.

Customers buy from businesses they know, like, and trust. Email marketing is a powerful and affordable tool in your digital marketing toolkit to build these relationships. Most businesses send monthly newsletters to stay in touch with their audience, but your results will improve with a structured plan and best practices that will be explored in this webinar. Whether you’re new to email marketing or looking to optimise your email strategy, this workshop will enable you to:

You will learn how to:

• Integrate email marketing into your wider marketing strategy and gain insight into your target audience.
• Understand the key stages of an effective marketing strategy.
• Segment your audiences and target and position your offering to them effectively.
• Create value-driven and customer-focused content for email marketing while measuring and testing its effectiveness.
• Identify the most suitable platforms and tools for email marketing campaigns, including different paid-for account levels.
• Optimise the different components of a successful email campaign through practical exercises.
• Use reporting and key metrics to ensure your campaigns are successful.
• Be compliant with legal requirements relating to email communications and use best practices for escaping the spam folder.

To book a place, click here.

Use AI-powered tools to edit clear, polished videos quickly and confidently.

Have you ever filmed a video, made several mistakes, started again a few times, then wondered how you’ll ever find the time to edit it? Descript is designed to make video editing faster, easier and more accessible. Instead of learning complex editing software, you can edit video by simply editing text.

This practical webinar will show you how to:

• Turn longer recordings into short, engaging videos for LinkedIn, Instagram Reels, TikTok and other social media platforms.
• Quickly remove mistakes, retakes, pauses and filler words without needing advanced editing skills.
• Repurpose webinars, presentations, training sessions and interviews into multiple shorter clips.
• Save time and reduce the technical barriers that often stop people creating video content constantly.

Key skills and techniques covered:

• Edit video by editing text – use AI transcriptions to cut sentences, remove mistakes and tighten your message with simple text edits.
• Improve audio quality with AI – reduce background noise and enhance clarity using Studio Sound.
• Remove filler words and hesitations automatically for smoother, more confident delivery.
• Generate captions and on-screen text instantly to improve accessibility and engagement.
• Create short social media clips using AI-powered highlights, markers and automatic reframing tools.
• Export polished videos ready for your website, social media channels and email campaigns.

To book a place, click here.

Protecting your Business Information, Name, Product and Website is important to businesses. This webinar will show you what and how to protect these business elements using Intellectual Property.

The information which your business generates and the product or service being offered are business assets and should be known about and protected as much as possible. Intellectual Property can be used for this protection but is not always fully understood or known about by new businesses or even some established businesses. In addition to Intellectual Property there are other means by which you can protect your business information, product or service.

This session will explain what means of protection is offered by Intellectual Property and other methods of protection available to the business and what you can do about it.

The session will cover:

• Why protection is necessary.
• What is Intellectual Property?
• It’s context within a business.
• Other means of protection.
• Ownership Protection processes.

We aim to successfully understand the importance of identifying valuable intellectual property and ow to take steps to protect it.

There will also be information on additional services from Business Gateway and details of other workshops which may be appropriate to you.

To book a place, click here.

This webinar aims to transform your attitude towards writing and help you create engaging, useful material for your website.

You’ll learn the secrets of persuasive writing, how to make writing more accessible and concise, and common structures to help get started when you’re staring at a blank screen.

Whatever business you’re in, being able to explain what you do in the written form is an essential skill and with our feedback and coaching you’ll get better at it. Whether you consider yourself good at writing or if it’s something you’ve always struggled with, you’ll find yourself both encouraged and challenged by this interactive, engaging session.

To book a place, click here.

Learn how AI search tools like ChatGPT and Google AI find and use information, and discover practical ways to improve your business visibility in AI-generated search results an recommendations.

Search is changing. People are no longer relying only on traditional Google search results to find information, compare businesses or make decisions. Increasingly, they are asking questions directly in tools such as ChatGPT, Goole AI, Gemini and other generative search platforms.

This session introduces Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and explains what it means for businesses that want to continue being found online. We’ll explore how AI systems discover, interpret and use information, why some businesses and websites are more likely to be mentioned, referenced or recommended than others, and how GEO fits alongside traditional SEO rather than replacing it.

You’ll learn about some of the signals that can help AI systems understand your business, including your website content, entities, authority, trust structured information and your wider digital footprint.

We’ll also look at how customer search behaviour is changing as people move away from relying solely on short keyword searches and increasingly use conversational questions, comparisons and recommendation-based searches. Most importantly, this session will focus on practical application.

You’ll leave with a clearer understanding of where GEO fits within your current digital marketing activity, what is worth paying attention to, and what actions you can start taking to improve the chances of your business being discovered, understood and recommended in an AI-driven search environment.

To book a place, click here.

Learn how to use the latest AI and digital content tools to save time, improve productivity, and create better marketing content.

This hands-on course introduces participants to ChatGPT, Gemini, AnswerThisPublic, Canva, and Google Sheets, showing how each tool can be used to support content planning, content creation, and marketing activities. Attendees will learn how to generate ideas, research topics people are actively searching for, create social media content, write blogs and website copy, design graphics more efficiently, and organise content plans using simple workflows.

By the end of the course, participants will have the skills and confidence to use AI and digital tools to reduce workload, improve content quality, and create more relevant content for websites, blogs, social media channels, and marketing campaigns.

To book a place, click here.

This session is designed for anyone beginning their journey into self-employment. You will be given clear, practical guidance to help you set up your business with confidence and avoid common pitfall.

Find out how to register your business with HMRC, what is meant by employment status and the different classes of NI contributions. Find out about what record keeping you need to carry out and understand the tax return cycle, payments to HMRC and possible penalties.

To book a place, click here.

The strongest brands have a personality – a distinctive way of looking, sounding and behaving that makes people recognise them, remember them and, crucially, choose them.

In this practical session, we’ll explore how to define your brand personality and turn it into a powerful commercial tool. You’ll learn how personality influences everything from the words you use and the content you create to the customer experience you deliver – and how getting it right can build trust, strengthen loyalty and ultimately drive sales.

We’ll look beyond logos, colours and fonts to uncover what really gives a brand character and why consistency matters at every customer touchpoint.

Because people 9don’t just buy what you sell. They buy into who you are.

During this session, you’ll discover how to:

• Define a clear and distinctive personality for your brand.
• Identify what makes your business different in a crowded marketplace.
• Understand how brand personality shapes customer perception and buying decisions.
• Develop a tone of voice that sounds recognisably like your business.
• Bring your personality to life across your website, social media, marketing and customer communications.
• Create consistency without making your brand feel predictable or corporate.
• Use storytelling and emotion to build stronger connections with customers.

Whether you’re building a new brand, refreshing an established business or simply feel your marketing has lost its spark, this session will help you create a brand hat feels more distinctive, more human and much harder to forget.

To book a place, click here.

Discover best practice recruitment techniques, interview planning, and candidate assessment methods to help you hire the right people and build a stronger, more successful team.

This session will equip you with the skills and techniques needed to interview effectively and make informed hiring decisions. You’ll learn how to prepare for interviews, ask insightful and legally compliant questions, assess candidates objectively, and create a positive candidate experience.

To book a place, click here.