Events Held Across Dumfries and Galloway to Encourage Women into Business
SOSE’s entrepreneurial event helps inspire women to follow their business-driven dreams
Last updated 27th Nov 2023
South of Scotland Enterprise hosted their latest in a series of pop-up sessions in Gatehouse of Fleet, aiming to help support and encourage business-related activity across Dumfries and Galloway.
A range of different local female entrepreneurs were invited as guest speakers where they delivered inspiring talks and presentations, focusing on key topics such as digital marketing, artificial intelligence and women's enterprise. This allowed them to share their own personal stories about how they started their own company and how to source funding and advice. Participants were given the chance to interact with the panel and get advice on how to widen their business network of support.
Events met with "enormous support"
SOSE, who partnered with Dumfries and Galloway Chamber of Commerce to deliver this event, were met with an enormous amount of support from women all over the region.
Kirstie Scrimgeour, SOSE Entrepreneurship Lead, believes these events are crucial for areas like Dumfries and Galloway as it allows women to build a network around them and see what support is available to them.
Kirstie added how nice it was to see everyone interacting with each other at the end of the presentations, swapping cards and sharing ideas.
Eva Milroy, Account Manager, was a guest speaker on behalf of Dumfries and Galloway College and discussed all the different types of services they can offer new businesses. Eva described the college as more than just full-time education:
“We offer anything from your short course to first aid to vocational qualifications, modern apprenticeships. We do this for programme courses, so you just go on our website and sign up to working with businesses and we organise bespoke training to suit that particular business need.”
One talk focused on importance of overcoming setbacks
Laura Maz kick-started the last event by presenting her fairly new business Iron and Pine. The five-year-old business creates modular buildings out of recycled shipping containers. Laura focused on talking about how her journey started and how to access the available funding. She emphasised on the importance of remaining motivated after experiencing a couple of setbacks.
“It’s a constant process but when you’re passionate about something, you always find the energy to take it to the next step. It only takes one great customer feedback or feedback from a show about how good your product is – it helps keep that motivation level high.”
With their last session of the year completed, SOSE reflected on how their enterprise events were able to help women. This type of event has proven to be aspirational to a lot of women – some even attended more than one session.
500 sign ups across south of Scotland
Kirstie from SOSE said:
“Our women’s enterprise sessions have been fantastic. This will be the last one for 2023 and since we had our first workshop in June, we’ve had just over 500 sign-ups across 15 to 20 different locations over the south of Scotland.
“The whole point of this is to show people a business story, their business journey and also show what kind of support is there through SOSE.”
These sessions allow SOSE to see what people’s aspirations are for the next year, helping them plan their next enterprise block for next year with their partner organisations.
“We’re able to see where there’s skills gaps, knowledge gaps, see what people want more of and it’s great to see the positive feedback that people left. It’s clear that people have gotten so much out of it and even became regulars to our networking. The ideas they’ve got and how they want to progress them and be part of the enterprise sessions as they grow is just amazing.”