Sister Led Business Showing the Power of Relationships to the Small Businesses of Lancashire

This year is an especially poignant year for sisters Nichola Howard and Jo Leigh as their business, Launch North West, celebrates its 10th Birthday.

2020 was going to be their year. The sisters had spent their Christmas break building a new master plan and this was the year they were finally going to see all the hard work growing their business pay off.

The ambitious siblings had grown Launch North West from small beginnings running local artisan markets in 2012 to hosting over 25 networking events per year and co-ordinating three huge annual Business Expo’s by 2019. They had a regular customer base of over 300 businesses from across Greater Manchester and Lancashire and even reached an online audience of over 6 million with one of their Business Expo’s.

By working with so many businesses at their expos they had come to realise that many businesses were struggling to take advantage of the massive opportunities presented by promoting themselves on the internet.

Launch North West took its business expo model to Media City, hosting its first digital specific event helping business owners take advantage of social media marketing. The event was so successful Nichola and Jo were able to develop working partnerships with big name firms including Microsoft, Tech North Advocates, Motionlab, and Macclesfield gamification giants Matmi’s Jeff Coghlan.

Following on from their success in Salford, the sisters took the show on the road the following year introducing The Digital Marketing Roadshow to Blackpool, Preston and Wigan.

Nichola explains the reason why she was so committed to educating the businesses of the North West.

“As a child of the 70’s I prefer physical connection and I didn’t really feel comfortable at first using the internet to build relationships with customers.”

Nichola continued “Jo has been in the background helping me with the marketing since I started the business almost 10 years ago, I just didn’t have the time or knowhow to start successfully marketing online.

We realised that if we were feeling like that, then others must be also, so we decided to help”.

They found that there were actually a lot of resources online for free, from blogs and articles, to full training courses aimed at beginners, like Google Garage, which covers every aspect of digital marketing.

While Nichola was learning online, Jo had gone to university to achieve a first-class honours degree in digital marketing at the grand old age of 42. She wanted the cap and gown and the trust and credibility which comes from earning an official qualification.

“It was at this point”, Nichola reveals, “that I realised that all of the face-to-face skills that I had developed were just as useful online. Business is just relationships and with a little training Facebook is just the same as face to face”

Following on from this work and training, 2020 was starting brightly and the stretch targets they set for themselves only months before seemed easy, turnover was increasing and they even managed to move into their first proper office.

They were looking forward to a summer of exciting events and expo’s and launching a new type of event later in the year.

What they didn’t see coming was giant tsunami of the global pandemic that saw them lose 60% of their business overnight. All businesses were hit hard by the series of national lockdowns, but the hospitality and events industry in particular were decimated as they were no longer able to host their face-to-face events.

Nichola describes how the lockdown affected her business. “We’d built our business by meeting people face to face, I have always been a strong believer in people buy from people, because that’s where the magic happens, from the relationships you build.”

The Corona virus totally put a stop to that.

The sisters had a choice to make, to give up, or to find a way to make their business work despite the almost impossible circumstances.

They decided to find another way.

Not everything they tried worked.

“We took our networking online for a while but that just wasn’t working for us. I hated zoom”, Nichola said.

“Due to Jo’s degree, we were already in the process of developing our portfolio of digital marketing products and services and exploring how we could grow our business further without the heavy reliance on face-to-face events.”

The sisters knew that there was still a generation of business owners that have either struggled with the lack of skills to run their business online or didn’t think it was a priority. During Lockdown, online marketing was the only way for the businesses that were allowed to stay open, to keep their customers informed and their shops trading.

 Almost instantly business owners got over their fear of using the internet.

Launch NW realised that their customers were feeling the same pains as they were, so they changed its whole business model to be more helpful.

“As the entire world was upside down, we chose to look at what we could do rather than what we couldn’t”, said Jo.

They reconnected with their business friends and found new ways to help them online – early versions of their new marketing products helped one local skip company triple its turnover and buy out its main competitor – even during the first Lockdown.

Jo continues, “We had marketed all our own events for years and had won a few clients off the back of that, so although under our old branding it wasn’t a service we offered, it was something we could most definitely do”.

As well as trying out some new products and services helping businesses to stay afloat during the pandemic, the extra time and space enabled the two businesswomen to re-evaluate their plans and their business as a whole.

Jo had been dying to do a rebrand on the business and now the pandemic had given them the opportunity and time to do that.

They reconfigured everything, from the ground up.

As well as their brand getting a refresh, they remodelled their office to be able to deliver training both face to face and online.

“With so much uncertainty around larger gatherings, we thought ahead and built a training room so that we could create smaller more controllable events when lockdown finished”. Nichola added.

As well as offering group training, Launch NW have begun to train the next generation of marketing apprentices on a one-to-one basis.

Local favourite, coffee shop by day and live music venue

Photograph by Noah Leigh. Age 12

by night, ‘The Snug’ won funding from the Arts Council to be able to reach out to new audiences, which meant they needed a new website and a digital marketing apprentice to take control of their social media activity.

Jo and Nichola have been training their apprentice Ben on how to directly apply what he has been learning at college to promoting The Snug, setting them up for a better future with solid digital foundations and a consistent brand.

Nichola explains.

“Our values have stayed the same, we just carried on applying our golden rule of “it’s all about the relationships.”

Jo continued. “Ben is now competent and consistent in his messaging which has helped The Snug transition back into being open to the public and sell tickets to their live music events to a much wider audience. He regularly calls into Launch HQ to sit with me, and we continue to develop his skills as and when he needs it.”

Even though the UK government rules for social distancing are now over, dealing with the impact of all of the Lockdowns is taking longer than anyone thought – all smaller businesses are taking a long time to recover.

Nichola and Jo understand first-hand the problems businesses are facing right now, and they want to ensure businesses know where to go for the help they need.

For Nichola getting back to face-to-face networking has been really important, with many people still opting for virtual or hybrid events. But for her, seeing people in the flesh is the catalyst she’s been waiting for.

“The partnerships we’ve formed are for the benefit of business owners like us, the microbusiness owners, the side hustlers, the freelancers, the people working hard for themselves and the people around them.”

One such partnership is that with Bolton business training company, KiN, co-founded by one of the sister’s long-time business mentors. This collaboration means the woman can signpost start-up business owners, who are looking for funded business training and advice, to the people who’ve

helped and added real value to their own business along the way, with Nichola adding:

“Businesses like ours grow outwards not upwards, we touch a lot of people.”

The women’s resilience was recently recognised as they were selected as one of only 100 businesses across Greater Manchester to become official partners of The Growth Company.

Relationship manager for The Growth Co, Michael Ayres said:

“We are delighted that LaunchNW have become an official partner of Business Growth Hub. Nichola and Jo’s expertise and passion for what they do are skills and values that you simply can’t replicate. This partnership represents their enthusiasm to support local businesses and communities, which are needed now more than ever.”

Nichola also found herself re-appointed as Wigan Vice President for the Greater Manchester Chamber of Commerce, meaning she is perfectly placed to share the news and updates that matter most to fellow businesses.

Her role has also highlighted, through data gathered by GMCC, that many businesses are reporting the same problems, one being the lack of digital skills to enable them to grow, something which has also affected the sisters.

Something that really hit home for Jo after completing her degree is the lack of applicable skills with businesses reporting that the people, they’re employing to do their marketing at graduate level, are not work-ready.

With the current digital skills gap being a genuine issue for businesses, the sisters included, their focus is now on creating ways to pass on their hands on knowledge and experience to other business owners who are struggling to master the online world of digital marketing.

The sisters have found post-pandemic, that business owners, even those who may have been reluctant before, are now understanding the value digital marketing can add to their businesses. The downside? They just don’t get it, or how to go about learning the skills they need with many having little or no marketing expertise in the business and no marketing team behind them.

“They’re winging it with their marketing and that’s ok to a point, at least they’re having a go.”

Jo continues.

“With so much information floating about online it can be overwhelming to know which information is useful, much of the advice on the internet is generalised, you can lose hours trying to find the answer to a simple problem. Hours you just don’t have when you’re trying to run a business.”

Recognising the role of the ‘accidental marketer’ Jo continues to explain why their new approach is what business owners need right now.

“If you’re not in an official marketing role but you carry out the marketing for your business or someone else’s, you’re an accidental marketer.

The goal for these courses is to keep time strapped business owners or ‘accidental marketers’ off Google and teach them the right things to focus on for their business.”

On a positive note, Nichola again emphasised the importance of surrounding yourself with the right people and shares some news for their 10th Birthday celebrations later in the year.

“We’re coming home to Blackpool, Blackpool Expo is where we want to be, organising no other business event makes us as happy as when we come to Blackpool, it was our annual reunion and I’ve missed that. So, we’re throwing an Expo Blackpool Style, and inviting the Northwest business community to celebrate our 10th Birthday with us.“ n D www.launchnw.co.uk N 01942 559306 E hello@launchnw.co.uk F @LaunchNorthWest I @launchnorthwest