Small business stories from the UK’s Top Towns for Business

Watch back: Small business stories from the UK’s Top Towns for Business

To celebrate local businesses and the towns that allow entrepreneurial spirit to flourish, Enterprise Nation and Dell Technologies in partnership with Intel ran a competition to find the UK’s Top Towns for Business.

Join this virtual event to hear brand owners and inspirational entrepreneurs from some of the finalist towns. The panel led by Emma Jones, Founder of Enterprise Nation discussed how they started their business journey, top tips for growing a successful brand and how they work with the local community to grow their businesses.

At the end of the event, the winning towns of the competition were announced.

Meet the panelists:

Steve Coburn, Managing Director of projectfive

Projectfive is a multi-award winning IT Support company based in Camberley Town Centre. During lockdown, Steve created the town’s Login Business Lounge – a 20,000 sq ft co-working space that includes a coffee shop, café and wine-bar, along with meeting rooms and desk-space for the town’s part-time commuters to WFA (Work-From-Anywhere). Steve is also the volunteer chair of the BID in the town centre (Business Improvement District).

David J. Tovey, Proprietor of MonTeas

David opened MonTeas retail shop, a purveyor of quality loose leaf teas and tea paraphernalia, in May 2012 at Monmouth, a small market town in South Wales, with a main street position following 18 months of product, industry and location research. 10 years later, MonTeas has survived arbitrary planning misguidance, the ravages of business rates, BREXIT, a global pandemic and a challenging local development plan yet sold enough loose leaf to make over 2.5 million cups of tea and 1000’s of teapots both locally and internationally.

Kate Proctor, Owner of Sew Creative

Kate started Sew Creative 6 years ago, after working in the fashion industry in both London and New York, and later training as a teacher. Sew Creative is a sewing school and fabric shop, based in Altrincham, they have been in their high street location for 4 years and have expanded to not only teach sewing to children, teens and adults, but they also now sell a range of fabrics, sewing patterns and gifts both online and in-store.

John McGowan, CEO of North West Business Complex

John set up and established the North West Academy of English over 20 years ago and it currently operates across Europe providing high quality language, professional development and cultural programmes to groups and individuals of all ages.

As well as his role within NWA, John is currently the Chair of The Nerve Centre which has grown to become an international brand and the leading Creative Media Arts Centre in NI. As a Social Enterprise, it employs over 50 people full time and operates throughout NI. John is also Chief Executive of the North West Business Complex, a 55,000 sq. ft. business incubator which opened in 2006 and provides flexible office and business space to over 100 SMEs. Drawing on this breadth of experience John will share his own insights on balancing commercial/social aims and scaling up a business.