Happy Christmas and our collaboration with Fina Fraternity

Happy Monday's is please to announce a new collaboration with Fina Bar and Grill and The Fina Fraternity. The Fina Fraternity is a opportunity to get together for a night of social networking in relaxed surroundings. It's the perfect place to catch up with friends or make new friends. Come together for business or pleasure with like-minded ladies from your local area and make new contacts. At every event, there are partners who come along to exhibit to guests. From health and fitness providers to dazzling jewellery boutiques.

The next event is on Tuesday 26th January and begins at 6pm for those wanting to join us straight from the office. Take advantage of 2-4-1 on all drinks in the bar area until 6.30pm or come along a little later once the school run is over and the children are settled.

Entry is £8 per person which includes a glass of wine on arrival and nibbles throughout the evening.
Please register your attendance to mandy@finabarandgrill.co.uk. Fina Bar and Grill is situated at 11 Marketplace, Macclesfield, SK10 1EB.

Future dates for your diary (last Tuesday of every second month) Tuesday 30th March and Tuesday 25th May.  

 A BIG THANK YOU TO ALL HM MEMBERS

I hope everyone has a restful and fun xmas and New Year and thank you for all the support this year, Sue and I have really enjoyed meeting lots of great women with so much enthusiasm and talent, it has been a great start for Happy Mondays and hopefully the New year will be even better.

I

Accountants and end of year woes

Last week we had a really informative session from Anthony Millner from Accounts & Tax Services UK - a Bollington-based accounting firm which specialises in small businesses and Ltd companies.

 

Anthony took us through the basics of the pros and cons of trading as a Sole Trader versus a setting up as a limited company, including the tax, NI and administrative implications of both. He also provided some guidance on the types of expenses we can and cannot claim for. His session was really useful and cleared up a lot of the questions we had - he also offered us access to a simple spreadsheet he has put together to help ensure we are all recording the information the Inland Revenue are going to require when it comes to that dreaded Self Assessment time!

 

Anthony can be contacted directly via accountsandtax@btconnect.com or via 01625 578030. He is also offering a 15% discount to all new customers to compile end of year accounts and tax returns - usually this cost will be less than what he can save you in tax so it may well be worth giving him a call, particularly with the Self Assessment deadline looming!

 

Free PR

 

Kelly Byrne is going a great job generating media interest in Happy Mondays and its members in the local media - we have coverage in this Thursday's MEN and more coming up in Local Life and Cheshire Independent in January. In order for your business to be part of future features we need you to compile 150-200 mini profiles of you and your business asap in order that she can send the out to the media. You simply need to provide an overview of your business, your contact details, plus some personal information abou yourself e.g. what was your career before you set up your own business, what made you start working for yourself etc. Please forward these back to me ASAP and Kelly can get to work!

 

We're also working on a local advertsing campiagn for 2010 and will shortly be sending out a questionnaire seeking your input on which publications you value the most, thus ensuring that we hopefully meet your needs.

 

 

Printers, christmas and parties

For people who were unable to make it had a lively and interesting round table discussion as usual, followed by a short presentation from Nicky from Macclesfield-based digital print and promotions company P81 - if you require anything from flyers to letterheads, pull up banners to business cards it's certainly worth giving them a acall on 08448 246246. Alernatively you can check out their range and prices via www.p81print.co.uk.

 

Next meeting

We'll be at Caffe Latte next week and are delighted to welcome Naomi Timperley from Baby Loves Disco as our guest speaker. She'll elaborate on how she's built up her business to its current level of success and talk us through her Dragon's Den experience. A talk not to be missed!

 

Happy Mondays Christmas Party

If, like us, you don't have much of a social life these days why not join us at our version of a Christmas office party? We'd love you to join us for the Happy Mondays Christmas Party at Fina Bar & Grill on Monday 14 December at 7.30pm. The set menu is £20.95 per head and can be found atwww.finabarandgrill.co.uk. More to the point, if you can persuade someone at home to pick you up, we can have a sneaky glass of something fizzy to help numb the pain of the impending festive season!

 

We need to get back to Mandy with numbers by the end of the week so, if you'd like to attend, please confirm back by return.

 

Finally, if you can get to Macclesfield this Sunday Fina will be holding a special family fun day with Santa Claus to raise money for Medquip4Kids from midday to 3pm. Families are invited to come along to support the well deserving charity on this special day out for children and adults alike with entertainment, a scrumptious Italian buffet, goody bag from Macclesfield Town Football Club and a trip to see the man who makes the magic happen for all children in attendance.

Tickets cost £15 per adult and £10 per child at can be purchase from Fina Bar and Grill. Call  01625 618 744 or email mandy@finabarandgrill.co.uk to reserve your tickets or for more information.

 

Hope to see you soon!

Google analytics and our mumpreneurs

Hi Ladies, thanks for another productive and enjoyable meeting and congratulations to a couple of our members:

• Firstly to Tracy from Elianna who, last Friday, fulfilled her long-held ambition of qualifying as a Dale Carnegie trainer. We look forward to hearing how it goes and hopefully being able to get a taster of the underlying principles at a workshop next year.
• Secondly to Naomi from Cook Clever who has secured a two-year contract with Manchester Metropolitan university which she will combine with running her cookery classes - busy girl!

Michelle Kay from Your Webstar then took us through the fundamentals of Google Analytics and how we can use the tool to help us engage users on our websites and measure how effective pages are at doing what we want them to do. I don't propose to go through all the points Michelle made but some of the key points were:

• Google Analytics (GA) is FREE to download and basically involes installing tracking code of every page of your website you want to analyse. You then receive regular reports which provide stats on how many people you are attracting to your site but, more importantly, how people are getting to and leaving it, how long they're staying on it and whether they're actually doing what you want them to do e.g. registering for a newsletter. This is relatively easy to do yourself, particularly if you have a content management system, or you can ask your web designer to do it for you. Michelle advised that if you're having a site built from scratch a good designer should built this in as a matter of course. If you have an existing site a rough estimate of price to install GA would be around £25 for a basic site.
• GA makes it easy to see which pages are working on your site and, as such, whether you need to change your marketing strategy, your website content or key words.
• You can set up goals on GA e.g. a set number of people per months to register for more information and then monitor your site's performance against these.
• You can identify words that are generating traffic to your site and then amend your content acordingly.
• By looking at the time people stay on certain pages or whether they exit your site from certain pages, you can use this data to determine which pages users are finding the most interesting and which ones are 'turning them off.'
• Getting your content right is key in terms of attracting and retaining users on key pages. This isn't rocket science but your content does need to be engaging and say what you need it to say otherwise your site simply won't work for you. To illustrate this point Eileen Coldrick from Virtual PA Services has kindly allowed us to see the 'before' and 'after' versions of  a couple of her website pages. Since Michelle helped her to re-write her content she's already seen a significant increase in traffic, even though the site isn't due to be finalised until later this week.

If any of you have any further questions regarding Google Analytics please contact Michelle direct.

Next weeks meeting

We're at Fina next week and our guest speaker will be Nicky Bates from P81 promotions and print

HM review and way forward

At our meeting on Monday we discussed what was best for HM and we decided the following:

• Meetings every 2 weeks from the New Year onwards
• More speakers  - I am organising the following speakers over the next few weeks and into the New year
• Accoutant
• Marketing specialists - Williams and Crosby
• Twitter experts
• Blogging experts
• Google analytics
• A talk from a Naomi from baby Loves Disco on Dragons Den and how she developed her business

Please tell me if you have any other ideas for speakers.

• Only one mail per week sent to members
• More speaker events

Hope to see you all next week to hear Naomi from Cook Clever discuss twitter.