Congratulations to Jay Beaumont and the team at Focus Magazine on your 200th Edition and the amazing contribution you make to the local community. We look forward to working with you for many years to come.
October saw another busy month for Business Port Macquarie. From meetings with the Mayor, Deputy Mayor, CEO and Federal member Pat Conaghan discussing how we can work together to benefit business, to working with Business NSW at a breakfast with our Federal member Pat Conaghan, Leader of the National Party David Littleproud and Senator Perin Davey on their listening tour.
On the 25th we held our AGM where we acknowledged our departing Board members Linda Elbourne, Greg Freeman and Tadhg Kelliher and thanked them for their input and involvement. We also recognised Janette Hyde, who stepped down after 16 years as a Board Member. Janette contributed so much to the Board through Business Awards, Christmas Parade, Events and so much more. Our board members volunteer their time to create a community where all businesses have opportunity to thrive and be supported.
We would like to congratulate and welcome our newest board members Charlie Cull from Assef’s Port Macquarie, Claire Matthews from Colourworks Australia, David Relf from NIS Power & Communications and Jenny Fraser from Mid Coast Connect.
Our new board members bring a wealth of knowledge and skills to Business Port Macquarie to assist our business community.
We look forward to introducing them to you over the next few months. Following the AGM we had a presentation from our State Member Leslie Williams speaking about the current stay of play in NSW, what has been delivered in our electorate and what is in progress in our region.
“Don’t worry about being successful but work toward being significant and the success will naturally follow.”
– Oprah Winfrey
Join us on Thursday, 10 November for breakfast and hear from the Dementia Friendly Initiative where we will learn how to make our businesses more dementia friendly and benefit these members of our community.
Stuart Goodfellow and our attendees at the first workshop
November is Small Business Month. To celebrate we are running our Small Business Accelerator Program. This is a course run one evening a week, over five weeks in November to assist new and established small business owners to not only work IN their business but ON their business… To assist small business to be in the best position to combat increasing running costs and interest rates and prepare for the future.
The topics that will be covered are HR, Building & Retention (Susan Judd, HR Culture), The Success Formula for Social Media Marketing (Bron Watson, The Social Coach), Plain English Financials, Understanding your bottom line and reports (David Ross, Direction Accounting & Business Coaching), Sales & Customer Service, Relationship Building (Stacey Morgan, Simply Stacey Morgan) and Time Management & Planning (Stuart Goodfellow, Regional Business Specialists).
Thank you to NSW Government for the Small Business Month grant that made this possible and to all our presenters. We look forward to bringing more business education programs to our members next year. If you would like to be involved in one of these programs please let us know.
Are you ready to celebrate New Year’s Eve? We are super excited to announce that New Year’s Eve fireworks are confirmed to go off with a bang!! A very big thank you to the team from Hello Sailor for sponsoring the midnight fireworks. We will also be holding a 9 pm Family fireworks display and will confirm soon who is sponsoring these. It is wonderful that we have businesses in our community that want to give back to all; you can say thank you by supporting them.
If you would like to know more about Business Port Macquarie, what we do and how you can be involved, feel free to give Katherine our Executive Office a call on 0422 562 300.
Until next month stay safe and keep smiling, people will wonder what you’ve been up to!
Alex
