Tamsin Henderson

If you’re reading this there’s a good chance you have at one time considered the possibility of running your own business. And as we all know, going it alone takes guts and more than a sprinkling of self-belief. That’s why I joined other existing and potential start-up owners to soak up some inspiration and insider knowledge, at the recent AWiSE event, ‘Do you have a business in you?’

“With the right support, you can set up and grow a successful enterprise to the level that fits your needs,” Liz Lyon of Rise Business Circle enthused. “Everyone has something useful to offer.”

Defining your ideas and mapping them to your skills and resources is the first step in turning the hypothetical into the viable. “Whether or not you want to develop your potential is a decision only you can make,” she added.

Mastering the psychological challenges budding business owners face is often the biggest barrier to getting started.  Liz’s business partner, Luanne Hill, explained the importance of getting that first impression right, “Whether it’s your bank manager or a potential customer, it’s vital to making someone understand why they should buy into you.”

Learn how to sell yourself in three seconds. Be positive: make eye contact, ask questions and smile. A lot! We tend to buy from people we like, even more so if we recognise genuine passion and commitment.

Based on Liz and Luanne’s advice, here are three simple tools to ensure your start-up gets the right attention in those critical first few moments.

1. Make a good impression

Just like celebrity stylist Gok Wan and his fashion followers, new start-ups need to stand out from the crowd.

Just as you wouldn’t turn up for an interview looking scruffy, the way you communicate – literally and metaphorically – has a crucial impact on the way people perceive you.    Everything you say or do, written or verbal reflects who you are and what you do.

Your website is often the place people will get their first impression of your company. Yet often we see long lists of functional attributes completely ignoring the customer’s hopes, fears and dreams (see point 3). And god forbid …typos!

“But my product speaks for itself!”

If you don’t make the effort to check your words, the underlying message is; how well would you look after a customer’s business?  As Gok might say, ‘dressing for success’ really does count, because spelling mistakes look lazy and people do judge you on this.

2. Keep it simple

They say brevity is the sister of talent.  Many start-ups are so jam-packed with talent, their passion leads to an excess of words. People have short attention spans, so cut out the waffle and get straight to the point.  Avoid jargon and remember, unless you are part of the fashion fraternity, strip out all the ‘fabulous’ and ‘amazing’ superlatives!

3. Paint a picture

According to Liz, we use six metaphors every ten minutes. These internal visual cues help deepen our understanding of the world around us.

As science increasingly shows emotion to be a greater driver in business than logic, these cues enable people to feel – not just understand – how good your product or service is.  In a competitive market, this could mean the difference between success and failure.  But how do we harness this?

They say, sell the lifestyle, not the car.   Forget the long list of technical features.  Sell the wind in your hair on a summers evening, cruising down the Champs-Élysées with the top down.  Spark emotion… create desire!

You can apply the same principle to the science and technology sector…

In my day job, I write about a pan-European terabit network.   It connects students and researchers all over the world and allows them to exchange high volumes of data.

Factually correct, but not very inspiring!

In my day job, I write about the world’s leading research and education network. Its high-speed bandwidth is accelerating scientific discovery, transforming the way 50 million scientists collaborate on solving some of humanity’s most pressing challenges.

Which one speaks to you more?

People want clear, tangible benefits they can visualise.  Crack this and you’re well on your way to making a good first impression.

Try it: next time you’re writing about your business, ask yourself who you have in mind.  Is it you? Your colleagues? Or are you writing for your customer?

Working for yourself doesn’t have to feel like jumping into the abyss.

No doubt, there are many others offering the same service or product as you.  But take time to focus on the needs and wants of your customer in a way that makes them feel valued, and you’ll have an indispensable head start over the competition.

Moreover, this will give you the confidence to focus on building a thriving and rewarding business.

Tamsin Henderson

Tamsin is an independent marketing and copywriting professional with experience in science and technology.

If you need clear, benefits-focused copy to help your business communicate better, find out more at www.hellogather.co.uk

It’s written in a large font, dip-in-and-out style, with bullet point lists and personal stories, full of humour and written in an uncomplicated style. It starts at the beginning, working while pregnant, going through issues you might encounter while off on maternity leave, help on decisions you may need to make about going back to work, and then actually being back at work and generally, all sorts of friendly advice and anecdotes.

I like the quotes particularly – both from the authors, their friends and famous people in history. It really is like having a whole support group on your bookshelf, with tips and suggestions from people who’ve “been there, done that” and somehow survived lots of the things that you might come across as a working mother.

For working parent members of Cambridge AWiSE, I’d particularly recommend relevant sections such as the Returning to Work chapter, Being Involved in Your Child’s Education, Managing Yourself and your Home. Re-reading the book recently, I had forgotten how many of the tips I now take for granted since adopting them a few years ago.

To get your hands on your own copy of this book, go to the Spinning Plates website, where you’ll also see a regular blog. They also have a Twitter feed which shows up if you “Like” their Facebook page.  If you are able to collect a book in person, you will get it for £12.99, but £14.95 otherwise with P&P to anywhere in the UK and the USA.

I have a copy so please give me a shout if you’re interested and I’ll try and bring it along to the next few networking events to show you. (If you’d like to contact Azu, please email Claire at info@camawise.org.uk and I will put you in touch.)

Azu Hatch

Chapter titles

1. Being Pregnant and Working
2. Arranging Child Care
3. Making the Most of Your Time Away From Work
4. Returning to Work
5. Working from Home
6. Managing Yourself and Your Home
7. Building Children’s Self Esteem and Independence
8. Being Involved in Your Children’s Education
9. Making the Most of Family Traditions
10. Mums the Word

Appendices

A.   When Things Go Wrong
B.   Lists, Lists and More
C.   Bibliography
D.   Websites
E.   Setting Up a Support Group
F.    Easy Family Meals
G.   Helping Others

I was guest speaker at a Springboard course yesterday and as part of my talk I wanted to articulate what CamAWISE was about and where it came from, what you can get out of CamAWISE that is hard to find elsewhere.

First off I guess I should explain what Springboard is.

Springboard is a personal development programme for all women staff/graduate students. It will give you the opportunity to take stock and consider your personal and professional goals. …Key areas covered include communication skills, assertiveness, self confidence, improving your work/life balance and developing positive skills and attitude. If you want to progress and develop, then this programme is for you.
http://www.training.cam.ac.uk/cppd/course/cppd-perdev3

This quote is from the University of Cambridge website but other organisations run it too. There are four days, one per month, with a group of around 20 people broken up into smaller discussion groups led by two trained facilitators.

I did the Springboard course myself nearly ten years ago at a time when I was having to make a lot of changes and I found it incredibly useful. I also met a lot of wonderful people and Springboard really was a springboard for the re-founding of Cambridge AWISE. A few of us got together with Joan Mason around her kitchen table in 2003 and the rest is history as they say.

I think what CamAWISE and courses like Springboard do is give women the chance to talk with other women about their careers, for example how they balance their personal life with their career, how they overcome stereotypes. In a CamAWISE meeting, as in a Springboard course, you can give voice to concerns and hear how others have dealt with them, not so that you can copy, but so that you can hear a wide range of views and then make up your own mind.

An example recently was a CamAWISE meeting where one woman recalled how she’d had a career break of a year, not really through choice, and was desperate to return to work. Another piped up and explained how she’d had a five year career break and was now gingerly considering how she might return. Neither approach is the only way to do it, it’s about working out what is best for you. Hearing about how others approached something can help you to come up with a solution. Because the atmosphere is positive and constructive, people feel able to talk about the good and bad aspects of their choices and that is really helpful for others.

The important thing is though, that many of these views are rarely voiced in the public domain, they are sparked off at CamAWISE meetings by open discussion in a positive environment. Many of the areas covered in the Springboard course are also covered in CamAWISE meetings, for example networking skills, raising your profile, confidence. Then CamAWISE covers a lot of other topics too such as negotiation, mentoring, starting out in enterprise, leadership, how to get your ideas adopted and many more.

If you get the chance to go on a Springboard course I would thoroughly recommend it, especially if you are having to or wanting to make changes or perhaps thinking that you should.

To support this initiative, I’ve written a guest blog post for Professional Engineering:

Getting Girls into Physics

A related article also appeared in the E&T magazine this morning:

International day encourages women to enter ICT

My views have been formed through many conversations, thought-provoking articles and inspiring talks, in many cases prompted by my membership (and steering group membership) of Cambridge AWiSE. I’m keen to know your thoughts and comments.

- Tanya

In the late 14th century Michel Menschein, a wealthy Viennese cloth merchant, commissioned local artists to paint a series of frescoes on the walls of his banqueting hall. The paintings depicted a cycle of songs by Neidhart von Reuental, a 13th century minnesinger, who was particularly fond of satirising the erotic relationships between knights and peasant maidens.

While the steamy subject matter doubtless enlivened many of Menschein’s dinner parties, it didn’t go down so well with subsequent occupiers. When the banqueting hall came into the possession of a Catholic priest in the late 16th century, the frescoes were painted over, and remained hidden for 300 years, until their chance re-discovery in 1979.

The frescoes now represent the oldest instance of non-religious wall painting in Vienna, and provide a unique glimpse into medieval humour and society. But the centuries under layers of paint and plaster, as well as the laborious process of exposure, took their toll. All the frescoes were damaged and some were almost completely destroyed. A restoration effort, led by the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts, was duly taken up, and it was supported by a group of mathematicians. It was an unusual collaboration, perhaps, but one which makes a lot of sense in this age of digital imagery. Digital photographs of the frescoes are essentially mathematical objects, and this puts the vast toolbox of mathematics at the restorers’ fingertips.

For her talk on May 9th, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb will take this collaboration as a starting point, and will sketch and motivate the different mathematical principles that can guide a digital restoration attempt. After a critical discussion of restoration results she will conclude by pointing out capabilities and limitations of digital restoration methods. Carola will also provide some hints towards applications of such mathematical approaches that go beyond the restoration of arts – such as medicine, forensics and geography.

Carola is a lecturer in Applied and Computational Mathematics at the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics (DAMTP), University of Cambridge, and Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge. She is head of the Cambridge Image Analysis group.You can read more about Carola’s work here and here.

Don’t miss this fascinating talk! Attendance is free, but please book your place here

I am a chartered holistic building design engineer, STEM ambassador, wife and mother.  I have a background in mechanical services (air conditioning, ventilation, heating) with a specialism in acoustics and a keen interest in sustainability.

I spent my formative professional years at Arup and Arup Acoustics in London, Edinburgh and Melbourne – a recruitment agent once spent 5 minutes on the phone marvelling at how anyone could be at the same company for 16 years!  More recently I have been a project engineer at University of Cambridge spin off company Breathing Buildings, who design and make low energy natural ventilation systems.  Last year, circumstances forced me into going self-employed, and at Cambridge Architectural Research I have found myself back surrounded by some of the greatest brains around.   I contribute to projects ranging from architecture, structure, seismic risk and energy use, producing CAD drawings, report input and analyses of data.

My working weeks have been part-engineering and part-mother ever since having my first child and it generally works well.  In between I contribute my time to STEMNet events throughout the year and help out at my daughter’s school science club.  To feed my love of books and also to help with promotion of STEM subjects to children, I have also become an independent book seller of a certain children’s book publisher.

I joined Cambridge AWiSE in 2009 when I first got made redundant and have just joined the steering group to add an engineering point of view to the group of inspiring women here.  I really like that cake eating has an unapologetically high place of honour in all of our events.

Azu.

My first introduction was from Lucy Spokes, when she was our co-ordinator, and attended the same OU Return to Work event as myself.  One meeting and I was hooked !  I am particularly interested in supporting other women who have put their careers on hold to raise a family and want to return to professional life.

After a career break, I am working within the Digital Services group in the University Library helping devise and implement new IT processes both for libraries and to support teaching across the University.

My first degree was in Metallurgy and Materials Science and I am married to a Research Physicist so have an appreciation of what working in Science involves, especially since I worked at Harwell during my gap year.  After graduation, I choose to work in IT joining Hoskyns (now part of CapGemini) as a Programmer working on financial systems.  I followed my husband to the States and worked on Warehouse Software in New York State visiting a wine warehouse in California and a baby clothes warehouse in New Jersey. On our return to the UK, I joined Reuters where I worked on European Stock Exchange data projects.  I worked part-time after the birth of my 2 children but eventually decided to stop commuting to London and studied for an OU Postgraduate Diploma in Software Development.

We then relocated to Cambridge (husband’s job) and I spent some time settling the family in.  During this time I started a relocated spouses’ group within my husband’s company and wish I had come across AWiSE at this point as I found it hard losing my support network.  I took a number of temporary part-time software testing jobs and then came across the OU Return to Work course for women in STEM (no longer running).  This lead me to a ‘Back to IT’ course run by Thoughtworks in London which updated my skills and confidence. After this I did some voluntary work for Aptivate in Cambridge before starting for my current full-time job 3 years ago.

Looking back at my objectives from the OU Return to Work course, I note that one was to make it easier for other women, including my daughter, to have a continuing career in STEM so am pleased to have a chance to help make this happen through AWiSE.

Anne.

Whether or not you want to develop that potential is a decision only you can make: all we ask is that you don’t make it until we’ve helped you to examine your resources (far more than you probably give yourself credit for), your options (the same!) and shown you how, with the right support, you can set up and grow a successful enterprise to the level that fits your needs and brings you the fulfilment we all deserve from our working lives.

Our workshop on April 24th is your opportunity to start exploring whether or not you want to take your idea forward or even to examine what that idea might be.

We’ll be making a start on the process of choosing the right objectives, mapping out the route to get there and mastering the psychological challenges.

Plus – can you “sell” yourself in the 3 seconds you have to create the right first impression? Can you make someone understand why they should buy your product/service? Do you know the shortcut to capturing your potential customers’ interest – we’ll help you start developing your killer comparison!

Don’t think you have the nerve to break yourself out of the situation you know and go for something new and scary? OK, then think about how you’ll feel 5, 10, 15 years from now if you don’t take this chance of finding out what you’re truly capable of. If that’s even scarier, come along to the workshop and let us show you how we can help you to succeed.

Rise is a 2-woman team with a mission to get small businesses off to the best possible start, thereby killing 2 birds with 1 stone: giving the economy a boost and helping to broaden and enhance as many people’s working lives as possible.

We are Luanne Hill, a businesswoman with over 30 years experience of setting up, running and successfully selling small companies, and Liz Lyon, a qualified coach with over 30 years experience of teaching, coaching and demonstrating that things you thought too difficult can actually be relatively easy. To find out more, please visit us at www.RiseBusinessCircle.co.uk , email us at info@RiseBusinessCircle.co.uk or call us on 01223 811913 (Liz) or 07593579636 (Luanne).

We’ll also be holding our AGM during the evening, at which the following posts are up for election:

• Chair
• Deputy Chair
• Treasurer
• Secretary

If you are interested in standing for election, nomination forms are available to download here. Completed forms should be returned to info@camawise.org.uk by Sunday 24th March, or you can bring your form along to the AGM.  You can also contact us by email if you would like further information before submitting your nomination.

We look forward to seeing you there!

Claire Lucas

Little did I know, when I joined Cambridge AWiSE in January 2012, that one year later I would be working as the group’s Coordinator! It was a talk on confidence by Kate Atkin which had caught my eye, and encouraged me to become a member. The evening was a fantastic introduction to the group, both in terms of the quality of the meetings and calibre of the speakers, and the friendliness of the members.

I first moved to Cambridge in 1983 – hard to believe it’s my 30th anniversary this year! – via an Environmental Science degree from UEA and an MSc in Environmental Technology at Imperial College. I found a temporary job through the Job Centre, working within a low-profile research and information team for BT. This was a stepping stone to my first permanent post, as Technical Editor at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, and thus my career in scientific information was launched.

Four years later I moved to the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) where I worked for eleven years, running a scientific literature alerting service for a number of clients in the chemical and allied industries. I left the RSC in 1999 and set myself up as a freelance scientific information specialist. One of my early clients was Cambridge Display Technology (CDT), where I worked two days per week on contract, becoming a part-time employee in 2008. At CDT, my work has expanded to include patent searching, and the nature of the company’s R&D means that my searches may cover anything from new light-emitting polymers to ink-jet printing or device structures.

Life is about more than just work, of course, and in my spare time I sing with a small a capella group, mainly by invitation at dinners and other events, but occasionally we put on our own concerts, too. I’ve also recently taken up tennis, for the first time since I left school, which has been satisfying and frustrating in equal parts!

And now, of course, some of my spare time will be devoted to my Coordinator tasks – a new challenge which I am very much looking forward to! Please feel free to contact me at info@camawise.org.uk if you have any questions, ideas or suggestions about Cambridge AWiSE’s activities and events. I look forward to meeting you very soon!