2013 February Business Gateway and National Womans’ Day
February has been such a quick month. Not only are Lady of the Glen another month older but I’m 6 months closer to getting married!!
For Lady of the Glen you may/should have read on twitter that February has been a research driven month as we prepare to take Lady of the Glen to the next stage of the business plan. It’s all about special flavour at Lady of the Glen and at the moment we are getting samples of some really great stuff to compliment that. We should hopefully have the finished article out in the next three to four weeks.
Unfortunately, we had to pull out of a trip to Birmingham to attend the Whisky Birmingham Festival. This was a very frustrating experience and despite the support from Amy Seton at the event we were unable to persuade Business Gateway and other organizations for support. This brings me to my main point and that is the lack of practical support available to businesses in Scotland.
It could be a lot better and there are three ways I would improve this,
Make networking events and courses accessible to everyone i.e. if people are working full time jobs and running their businesses part time the course should be after 5pm and lets make the courses in a central area/town not in the middle of nowhere
Provide small financial grants to cover costs for attending business events which are of a benefit the organization or cover membership to things like your Local Chamber of Commerce
Don’t discriminate businesses based on the owners age and their working profile
I’m pleased with the steady increase of twitter followers and the great reviews we are getting through our social media. We are still in the Balerno Konect magazine and a few other media outlets.
We will be sending out our quarterly newsletter soon for all you members who have been waiting for it and we have response regarding the samples we sent out to some members.
In other news it was National Women’s day yesterday and mothers day tomorrow, so I heartily recommend you get the special woman in your life a Lady of the Glen orientated treat. But, aside from the product push, International Women’s day is very important because it helps draw attention to women which is a notable issue in the Whisky industry. Women are a market sector over patronised I feel, especially with crude assumptions about ‘let’s create a new line with sweeter products because women like sweet things’. In actual fact, research shows men are more inclined to like sweet drinks. Furthermore, women are generally under-represented in the industry, recruiters should address this. Miss Whisky has two a part article which helps express this better than I could.
Lastly, we at Lady of the Glen were distraught to learn about the poor show at this Whisky firm and we have lamented together this terrible, terrible news. We are working on the Pibroch.
Enjoy March,
Best,