Do you want to see ALL the action from the BusinessMums Summit? Check out the official photos from Mi Bewick who covered the day for us.

To find the photos, go to www.mibewick.co.uk and click on “order your photos”. If you love one of the images and want to use it on your site, you can buy and download them too.

Do you want to see ALL the action from the BusinessMums Summit? Check out the official photos from Mi Bewick who covered the day for us.

To find the photos, go to www.mibewick.co.uk and click on “order your photos”. If you love one of the images and want to use it on your site, you can buy and download them too.

What did Tracey think of the conference? She says, “The opening speech at the conference gave me instant reassurance that everyone in the room was juggling the same kinds of family chaos – even Laura Tenison with her brilliant talk.

I am still benefiting from the networking that I did throughout the day, and have stayed in touch with a number of people who I was fortunate enough to meet. What I found so refreshing was that people were genuinely happy to share stories and best practice. I left with a real buzz to stay on track and launch my new business ASAP.

Tracey is loving her new work: “Molly Coddle Childrenswear is adding so much into my life and I love the ability to balance my work/life (most of the time).” As a result of the conference, she says, “I have reviewed my short, medium and long term plans and have put more structure into

• Social networking
• Marketing for business objectives
• Winning awards
• Measuring KPI’s

There is still an enormous amount to be done. But even in a difficult economic time, there were so many success stories to spur you along. The conference actually feels more valuable to me today than it did immediately afterwards.”

Check out Tracey’s Molly Coddle Childrenswear website at www.mollycoddlechildrenswear.co.uk, find her on Face book or follow her on Twitter: she’d love your views or feedback.

And if you’d like to share your businessmum experiences, drop a line to antonia@businessmumsconference.co.uk

Do you want to see ALL the action from the BusinessMums Summit? Check out the official photos from Mi Bewick who covered the day for us.

To find the photos, go to www.mibewick.co.uk and click on “order your photos”. If you love one of the images and want to use it on your site, you can buy and download them too.

BBC South East – BusinessMums Summit – 101011

Do you want to see ALL the action from the BusinessMums Summit? Check out the official photos from Mi Bewick who covered the day for us.

To find the photos, go to www.mibewick.co.uk and click on “order your photos”. If you love one of the images and want to use it on your site, you can buy and download them too.

Speed networking

Good intentions don’t always equal success. What actions are you going to take after the Business Mums Summit? Perhaps you have already achieved some?

As Karen Skidmore from Can Do Can Be, made quite clear in her ‘pep’ talk, attending an event such as Business Mums Summit is only as good as your commitment to achieve your objectives. Networking doesn’t just ‘happen’, you need to follow up and make good on those promises to yourself.

Remember seeing a ‘blogger’ walking around with a 9 week old baby in a sling at Business Mums Summit? Well that was me. Even though I breastfed 5 times at the event plus was on liveblogging/vlogging duties that day, I managed to network. When you carry a small baby around with you, that will ‘happen’ but we can’t all snatch babies to attract attention now can we? The point I’m trying to make though, if I can change the mother of all poo-plosion nappies while chatting to a local business woman about how we can support one another, who can’t leverage their discussions from the day? (the lovely Michelle from Pebbles followed me to the baby change, quite voluntarily by the way and I was glad of the company). The cupcakes and coffee were amazing but if you tilted your head up from the cake stand, there were more amazing women in the room. It’s a good chance you swapped business cards with one and promised a chat, e-mail or just a tweet.

You went to a conference to be inspired, network and find something to motivate an element in your business or life. You only have three more steps to fulfil that objective: write down your thoughts from the day to keep the ideas alive, add to your ‘to do list’ when you are going to send that e-mail/ tweet, add to your calendar when you want to achieve your next business/ life goal.

To refresh your memory with key messages from the Business Mums Summit, download the presentations here or read the liveblog feed. Post below what you’ve already achieved since the event! We’d love to hear what worked for you.

If you wrote a blog post after the day or are in the process of, link back here, share your thoughts with your fellow delegates or inspire others to book up for next year!

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The awards illustrate all the hard work and soul mumpreneurs put into their businesses. How many times did we hear the story, from various different speakers during the programme, how they all started businesses while on maternity leave? According to our speaker Kate Garraway and a scientist whose name I didn’t capture, it’s down to the hormones released in our bodies after giving birth. Apparently they unleash a creative mind expansion that never goes away which culminates in many women needing to start projects to engage that energy. That explains a lot! Looking at the faces I did know in the room at the Mum and Working Awards, it was evident this creativity was in such supply, I’m sure you could have bottled it. Franchisors who have dramatically been expanding in less than 12 months, business women who have developed signing for the deaf into a major kids activity and a lone business dad who was brave enough to venture the idea that antenatal education needs to be more tailored to both men and women.

Dean Beaumont, aka Daddy Natal, scooped up Business Parent of the Year award. He admitted to me that his partner Steph was part of the driving force behind the business, ‘It should be ‘parentpreneur’ as it’s a real team effort.’ he beams. Could it be that in five years time, ‘parentpreneur’ is the word to make it to the Oxford Collins Dictionary and we’re sitting sipping bubbly with more than one man in the room? Someone’s already bought the domain name…..

Dean gives us his reaction on winning the award.