In Your Shoes - Alison Henderson

Back to the August post-holiday rush as we're welcoming new members, talking about new circular economy projects and having lots of membership meetings! 

Monday: Memberships, Start-Ups and much more!

Back from annual leave and lots to catch up on including welcoming new members to the Chamber, reviewing CVs for our Membership & Business Development Lead and preparing for the upcoming Board Meeting and Chamber Golf Day in the same week! 

Picture is from when I was away in Cardiff seeing the amazing Billy Joel in concert - we had a brilliant time, but you can tell that it's on the west coast...definitely more drizzle than we get in Sunny Dundee.

We're getting a huge amount of interest from people starting out their business journey...our Start-Up Offer for the first year of membership for those organisations who need a helping hand is really popular...at just £100 inc VAT for the year, its really worth investing in! 

Tuesday...Airgonomics & Apartments

Catching up with enquiries and new members keen to join the Chamber as they get things moving with new ventures in the local area.

I've been speaking to Katy Air of Airgonomics™and also Langley Serviced Apartments - it's great to have such diverse businesses who understand the benefits of being in our network. 

Looking forward to a coffee & a catch up with Katy and her partner Chris next week so that I can show them round the Member Lounge and all the other facilities here at 37 City Quay.

 

Digital Marketing...it's in every conversation

Wednesday and I'm still balancing holiday catch up with meetings to discuss empowering young people in Circular Economy, seeing new members and talking about coffee, rather than drinking it!

I had the absolute pleasure today meeting with the very inspiring Jamie Wilson-Elfverson about her new enterprise: Digital Rinse. Jamie has a huge depth of experience from the work she has done with tech companies, being in teams during organisations scaling up their businesses and in delivering impressive marketing campaigns that saw hugely powerful personalised ROI results for a very well known retail brand. And in the way that Dundee & Angus is like a village, I worked with her husband before I joined the Chamber, so he was definitely an encouraging factor in sending her in to see me. 

Then I finished the day with a great catch up with Findlay from Caber Coffee...if you've not seen the stunning machines that they supplied to the Balmoral Estate, please go and have a look. If we end up with as good a coffee experience in our Member Lounge as they enjoy at the Royal residence on Deeside, we'll all be very happy indeed!

Life Sciences and the local economy

Thursday and it's time to chair the Dundee Inclusive Economic Growth group's meeting, hosted at the Centre for Targeted Protein Degradation (CeTPD) on Dundee's Hawkhill. There has been huge recent investment at this location, from developing this amazing CeTPD centre lead by Professor Alessio Ciulli to the work building the new life sciences innovation hub.

The Hub will provide specialist infrastructure to support life sciences commercialisation, collaboration, and innovation. The project is forecasted to support over 800 new life sciences jobs by 2053 and deliver over £190million of benefit to the local economy.

We had a tour of the CeTPD building & labs from Professor Alessio Ciulli (picture thanks to University of Dundee), then received updates from a number of project owners and leaders in this hugely important sector...thanks to Dr David McBeth, Prof Sir Mike Ferguson, Dr Morag Martin and Dr Pamela Duke. Creating the many jobs that this sector needs will be critically important for the region, attracting & keeping talent in the city, as well as supporting company growth.

Powering Futures & Cyber security

Earlier in the week, I had a meeting to discuss how we can support a new project in the local area, empowering young people to drive circular economy principles and practices in their workplaces...I'm really looking forward to seeing how we can work alongside Zero Waste Scotland and our Circular Tayside Ambassadors in this programme. 

And another new member meeting to finish off the week...this time I got to hear about the work of The Global Village Development Centre as I welcomed Kasturi Dasgupta into the Chamber Board Room and talked through the many ways that the Chamber can support their growth. Based at Abertay's Cyber Quarter, this team can offer a wide range of support to SMEs...watch out for more information to come from them. Safe to say they have a huge breadth of skills & experience that many companies and business owners will find worth hearing about. 

And to finish off the week with a bang, we had a great Chamber Champion referal from Gale McIntyre of McIntyre Properties as the Rotary Club of Dundee joined up as a member. That means McIntyre Properties gets to choose a small thank you from us...we're always grateful for members' support!