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                <h1>business.connected</h1>
                <p>We’re partnering with Vodafone Business to equip 150,000 small businesses with the digital skills they need to take their operations to the next level.</p>
                <p>The free training programme – delivered exclusively online, and consisting of workshops, webinars and e-learning modules – will empower businesses to kickstart digital change, adopt new technology, and stay safe online.</p>
<p>Joining the initiative is Samsung Electronics UK. Small businesses will now be able to access a range of free Samsung-inspired digital training courses, covering everything from business productivity to protecting digital security.</p>
	
				<p>All participants will be offered a free consultation with a <a href="https://www.vodafone.co.uk/business/sme-business/small-business-advice/personal-advice?cid=en-ent/vhub-ap/dbritain/aws/4.21/ntst" target="_blank">Vodafone Business V-Hub adviser</a>, who can advise on everything from digital marketing strategies to online security. You can speak to a V-Hub adviser Monday-Friday from 8am-6pm. </p>
				
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                <h4 class="text-secondary">Interactive workshops</h4>
                <p style="font-size: 0.9em; width: 80%; margin: auto;">Join one of our interactive digital workshops, led by an expert and learn how to become a digital changemaker. </p>
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                <h4 class="text-secondary">E-learning modules</h4>
                <p style="font-size: 0.9em; width: 80%; margin: auto;">Get specialist, solution-based training on how you get the most out of collaboration, online trading, security tools and more. </p>
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                <h4 class="text-secondary">Fortnightly webinars</h4>
                <p style="font-size: 0.9em; width: 80%; margin: auto;">Sign up for a webinar, where our experts will be unpacking key digital topics and providing you with the latest insights &amp; thought leadership. </p>
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                <h2>Access e-learning</h2>
                <p>Bespoke training on digital solutions</p>
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                    <div class="col-sm-6 col-md-4"><div class="en--card"><a href="/learn-something/use-microsoft-teams-for-your-business/" class="card-main-container"><div class="card-badge">e-learning</div><div class="card-image" style="background-image: url(&quot;https://embedwistia-a.akamaihd.net/deliveries/db23c2efa1e135b5546b90d02750274c1e0c0331.webp&quot;);"></div><div class="card-avatar"><img class="card-avatar-img" src="https://enterprisenation.blob.core.windows.net/enterprisenation/d9deb11c5afae911a813000d3a7ed688/en-author-logo.jpg"><div class="card-avatar-text"><span class="card-avatar-name"><span>Enterprise Nation</span></span><span class="card-avatar-title"><span style="font-size: 12px;">Official</span></span></div></div><div class="card-body"><span class="card-body-date">Thu 27th May 2021</span><h3 class="card-body-title" style="height: 84px;"><div style="height: 100%; font-size: 30px;"><div style="display: block;"><span>Use Microsoft Teams for your business</span></div></div></h3><div class="card-body-main" style="height: 54px;"><div style="overflow-wrap: break-word; display: block;">Discover how to send chats and send images and files, make audio or ...[more]</div></div><div class="hide"><div class="clear"></div></div></div></a></div></div>
                    <div class="col-sm-6 col-md-4"><div class="en--card"><a href="/learn-something/create-your-online-store/" class="card-main-container"><div class="card-badge">e-learning</div><div class="card-image" style="background-image: url(&quot;https://embed-fastly.wistia.com/deliveries/809fa98c428e2483331e0ed2c6cef1d3a40f31ed.webp&quot;);"></div><div class="card-avatar"><img class="card-avatar-img" src="https://enterprisenation.blob.core.windows.net/enterprisenation/d9deb11c5afae911a813000d3a7ed688/en-author-logo.jpg"><div class="card-avatar-text"><span class="card-avatar-name"><span>Enterprise Nation</span></span><span class="card-avatar-title"><span style="font-size: 12px;">Official</span></span></div></div><div class="card-body"><span class="card-body-date">Thu 27th May 2021</span><h3 class="card-body-title" style="height: 84px;"><div style="height: 100%; font-size: 30px;"><div style="display: block;"><span>Create your online store</span></div></div></h3><div class="card-body-main" style="height: 54px;"><div style="overflow-wrap: break-word; display: block;">Learn how to find the best e-commerce platform for your products, the ...[more]</div></div><div class="hide"><div class="clear"></div></div></div></a></div></div>
                    <div class="col-sm-6 col-md-4"><div class="en--card"><a href="/learn-something/using-seo-to-bring-customers-to-your-website/" class="card-main-container"><div class="card-badge">e-learning</div><div class="card-image" style="background-image: url(&quot;https://embedwistia-a.akamaihd.net/deliveries/081d27a23cc97d155abe5f2bcfbf8ec7b34e074f.webp&quot;);"></div><div class="card-avatar"><img class="card-avatar-img" src="https://enterprisenation.blob.core.windows.net/enterprisenation/d9deb11c5afae911a813000d3a7ed688/en-author-logo.jpg"><div class="card-avatar-text"><span class="card-avatar-name"><span>Enterprise Nation</span></span><span class="card-avatar-title"><span style="font-size: 12px;">Official</span></span></div></div><div class="card-body"><span class="card-body-date">Thu 27th May 2021</span><h3 class="card-body-title" style="height: 84px;"><div style="height: 100%; font-size: 26px;"><div style="display: block;"><span>Using SEO to bring customers to your website</span></div></div></h3><div class="card-body-main" style="height: 54px;"><div style="overflow-wrap: break-word; display: block;">By understanding what's being searched for, creating tailored content, an...[more]</div></div><div class="hide"><div class="clear"></div></div></div></a></div></div>
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Business Connected

<p>After successfully completing over 12 years of consulting with companies on a 1:1 basis on their business and financial performance I am now entering the training world to engage my passion for teaching, training, guiding and mentoring entrepreneurs, founders and business owners to thrive financially. I am here to offer you the opportunity to benefit from my expertise in Pricing and Cash Flow Management. I am proud to be known as <strong>The Price Mentor</strong> and I would be proud to teach you The Price Code Methodology</p>

Business Owner and Founder

Brian Cooney

Owner/director

Paddy Mc Dermott

<p>Specialist in Web Design, Digital Marketing, Social Media, SEO, Analytics and Big Data.</p>
<p>Owner and founder of Feedalpha.com and Yourweb.ie</p>

Gary Evans

Enterprise Nation has helped thousands of people start and grow their businesses. Led by founder, Emma Jones CBE, Enterprise Nation connects you to the resources and expertise to help you succeed.

Eight pricing strategies to maximise your business  profit

Enterprise Nation has partnered with Vodafone, Microsoft and Klarna to help business owners across Ireland improve their digital skills.

<p>JournoLink is arguably the most valuable piece of your marketing toolbox.&nbsp;</p>
<p>19 out of 20 of us now make our buying decisions based on recommendations. Only 10% of us trust social media, but nearly half of us trust the word of journalists. So using journalists to promote your business has never been more important.</p>
<p>JournoLink works directly with businesses, and freelancers who manage the PR and marketing for clients.</p>
<p>It&apos;s the online platform that gives you all you need to manage your PR and that of your clients, linking you with the journalists that are keen to hear about the business, and giving you the help you need on how and when to engage with them.   Across the JournoLink team we have a wide spread of PR skills to help you, from the insights of a working journalist to the experience of people who have promoted their businesses through the media, and have handed difficult interview challenges. The platform cost is from less than £50 per month inclusive, and also lets you work on a PAYG basis if that suits you better.</p>

Director

Meet the journalist in a live Q&A session

<strong>JournoLink is an interactive platform enabling you to manage your own PR and send out your business stories to journalists, broadcasters and bloggers</strong>

Put all your PR questions to working journalist Tetteh Kofi in this live webinar

How to build effective relationships with journalists

Live webinar delivered by the JournoLink team on how to connect with journalists to give you the best chance of getting your business into the press.

Cathal Sheridan is founder and CEO of Huku Balance, a Donegal based company who make balance boards for both adults and children.

Sustainability has always been at the core of the business despite the cost of materials soaring and the supply chain drying up. Cathal tells us how Huku Balance has maintained its values despite these challenges.

Your business has grown quite a bit over the past two years. How is it going now?

We’ve increased our sales, not just in Ireland and the UK but we are starting to ship right across the world – the United States, Singapore, Japan, Australia - so it's been fantastic with growth.

We've also been continuously revising the way we make our products, from an environmental, but also from a cost point of view because the price of everything has been going up so much these last few years.

We had to revisit the way we make things and just try and get a bit clever with how we do things to cut costs, so we didn't have to increase prices - that was a big part of the last couple of years.

Give some examples of how you have managed to keep the costs down while maintaining the sustainable integrity of the business?

Take our balance board rollers for example. I mean, I could have very easily gotten those shipped over from China and made for a fraction of the cost, but there is enough virgin plastic out there, we don't want to add to it. We can make it a more beautiful product, that’s environmentally sustainable, ourselves.

We had to look at how we made those and using different methods because the cost of the material is almost three times as much as it was.

Huku balance board and roller

We’ve managed to keep the wood as the main material, and for the grip it's upcycled cork and natural rubber - that's something, again, that we managed to keep a hold of. I mean, there are cheaper alternatives, but they don't recycle well, and they'll sit in landfill for a very long time, so they weren't really options for us.

We put up our prices by a couple of euros each just to cover the cost of materials. We absorbed two price hikes before we increased our prices and we’ve absorbed the last three price hikes since.

That was just down to changing the way we made the product. We invested in different machinery, and we just designed new procedures, and it cut the costs of production down.

I’m hoping we've hit kind of the peak for having to absorb prices, because I'm hoping we're going to start to see the prices returned to normal over the next year.

What was having such an effect on the increased cost of your materials?

In January this year, we saw the price decrease a little bit - supply chains were kind of just getting back to normal post pandemic. The factories that produce the wood were getting back to normal production runs. We did see a decrease in price in January and early February.

Huku balance board in the making

Our main material is from the Baltic region of Europe. We’ve always gotten it from Latvia and Estonia. Russia is part of the Baltic region, and Finland is a big producer as well although the Finnish material was always very expensive.

When Russia invaded Ukraine people stopped purchasing Russian products and everyone wanted wood from Latvia and Estonia and the prices went up again.

In late January, when the price had come down, I’d ordered enough material to get us through most of this year, so we've been able to avoid the more recent price hikes.

Those factories are now starting to get to a point where they can meet the demand. Look, we don’t know how long the war is going to last but we do know the factories are beginning to meet the demand, and we are hopeful the prices will start to stabilise.

Working on a Huku balance board

What other sustainable practices have you in your business?

Our boxes are made from recycled cardboard, and we get deliveries all the time and we keep that cardboard ourselves to use as a packaging filler. We use recycled packaging paper as well and even our masking tape is recycled paper. Everything we send out packaging wise, is biodegradable.

It's the least harmful way of doing it. We'd love to get the boxes sent back but I just don't think it's feasible at the moment.

At the moment, we're working with Tree Nation planting in various places around the world. One place we're focusing on is Sri Lanka and planting the three types of trees that help prevent coastal erosion.

Our long-term plan is we'll be buying land ourselves locally and planting native Irish trees alongside the ones worldwide - I think at the moment, it's more a case of asking where's the priority in the world? where do they really, really, need them? Eventually it'll be a nice bonus to be able to do it locally as well. This year we’ve planted almost 700 trees.

What are the future plans for Huku Balance?

We want to continue to grow our product range and continue to grow our sales worldwide. This year we’re focusing more on the UK, and Western Europe, towards the end of the year we want to increase our awareness of our brand in the United States.

That's going to help us get to a point where we can hire more people. More local jobs is a big bonus for me personally, it keeps people in their local community rather than having to head off to a city and work.

We want to continue to focus on creating products that are not bad for the environment. We have some prototype designs and it's a very simple solution to use a piece of plastic and get them launched, but it's just not what we're about. There are challenges there, but we want to continue to abide by the rules we’ve set ourselves.

Freelance Journalist

Finding the balance between sustainability and rising costs – Cathal Sheridan

Donegal's Cathal Sheridan talks us through how he handles the rising costs in his balance board business.

to support women across the UK and Ireland in growing their businesses online.  

Our accredited #SheMeansBusiness trainers will tell you how to best use Meta and the Meta family of apps to grow your business. 

To meet the trainers and sign up for more events and courses like this, visit the

#SheMeansBusiness: Inspire action on Instagram

Enterprise Nation Ireland's Access to Finance online events kick off this Thursday with 

Access to Finance: How to apply for a start-up loan.

Johnny Harte will chair a panel discussion covering what you need to consider when applying for a start-up loan, the benefits and challenges of securing funding for your business through a start-up loan, and how to apply for one.

free 45-minute event on Thursday 30 June 2022 at 2pm

 we've shared four tips to consider before asking for a bank loan.

What to consider before applying for a bank loan

Having a solid business plan is your first toe in the door.

There's no point in rocking up to the bank looking for a loan if your accounts aren't straight. Your target revenue figure has to come from somewhere, and the bank is going to need evidence of how you're calculating that figure.

Before you approach the bank for a loan, make sure they know who you are and what your business does. Strike up a relationship with the bank's relationship manager and let them show you their products, once you've shown them yours.

Having the bank understand what you do and how you do it can be half the battle in loan negotiations.

If the bank doesn't approve this loan, your business is going to have to survive one way or another, so make sure you have a back-up plan.

Check out your other options and be ready to kick something into action if the bank decides to refuse your loan application. There's no time to dwell, you've a business to run.

Access to Finance: How to apply for a start-up loan

Small businesses frequently need support with managing money and accessing finance. Enterprise Nation has partnered with SBCI, BPFI and Sage to show you which funding options are available to you, and to help you gain access to them.

 is for small business owners who want to learn more about start-up loans:

funding-hub-banner.jpg

Enterprise Nation is working with SBCI, BPFI and Sage to support 30,000 small businesses across Ireland with the information on funding options. 

Bank loans: Four things to have in place before you apply

Start-up loans are the topic for the first Enterprise Nation Access to Finance event. Here are four tips to get you started.

Free CRM with HubSpot plus 30% off upgrades

HubSpot's CRM platform has all the tools and integrations you need for marketing, sales, content management, and customer service. Each product in the platform is powerful alone, but the real magic happens when you use them together.

Get paid faster with FREE Satago Lite

<br>
Satago is pleased to offer Enterprise Nation members this free subscription (normally priced at £10 per month) to help you better manage your cashflow and maintain great customer relationships.&nbsp;

Invest your business cash with InvestEngine

Looking to earn more from your company’s cash reserves? InvestEngine’s Business Account, gives you an easy-access investment portfolio, tailored to your business and right now, they’re offering all new customers a £50 Welcome Bonus.