Hello and welcome to the April newsletter from the Worcestershire Growth Hub. I’m delighted to open this newsletter with some fantastic news that the government have chosen to support Worcestershire Growth Hub in our next 12 months as we continue to deliver vital business support and other services to Worcestershire businesses.

This month we have a few key updates to bring you as the team continue to work away preparing for the next few months of business support. The first big update is that we are working with the Local Enterprise Partnership to conduct a Worcestershire business survey. We are looking for local businesses to complete the survey to help us understand the challenges that you face so that we can align our future to those business needs. I strongly encourage all readers to take part in the survey, it takes five minutes and is completely anonymous. Please do take part so your voice can be heard.

I’d also like to remind you that we have a series of informative articles and blogs on our website. These were put together by our specialist advisors and can really help your business across a range of topics including finance marketing and most importantly at the moment, cyber security.

We also have spaces available on the Elevate programme, for those of you who may not have heard of Elevate, it’s a business support programme designed to help our businesses to grow and develop and go to that next step. This programme can help with mentoring as well as providing grants of p to £15,000 and if you’d like to hear more information about this, follow the link on the newsletter.

This is a reminder to any of you who may employ or support apprenticeships in the county. There is still time to enter the 2022 Worcestershire Apprenticeship Awards. These are awards for apprentices and employers of all sizes, and it’s a great opportunity to profile your business, more information is on the screen.

We also have the return of the BetaDen Beers later this month and this is a great opportunity for you to hear more about the technology community in Worcestershire and how you and your business can benefit from being part of the BetaDen programme. We have more information on this in the newsletter, but we look forward to seeing you there.

Finally, I’d like to take this opportunity to wish you all a fantastic Easter break, enjoy your time with your families, come back refreshed and we look forward to speaking to you in May with more updates.