So much water runs under our bridge that it feels like we are atop a rushy river with barely a chance to process one thing before we head right into the next. We started out reviewing the year that has just passed a few years ago, and have found it to be a grounding way of expressing the pace and change we have experienced, but we have found it really useful to help us acknowledge our achievements along the way.
So, what have we been up to this year?
We started a partnership with the FSB in early 2023 to bring networking for small businesses to our local community. Having been tenants of the Peak District National Park, here at their HQ in Aldern House, for many years now, we also persuaded them to get in on the partnership and they kindly provide the room in which we gather. Each month we invite a new speaker to come and educate the group on matters close to our small business hearts, and each month that passes marks time at a pace that makes us feel like we have romped our way through the past year. So who joined us in 2024?
One of the very first announcements we got to make as the New Year shuffled into our lives was that Debbie became a full member of the Garden Media Guild. Having worked with gardening clients for over 15 years, you might also say that it was about time!
It’s not just what we have been up to that gives us joy, but what our clients get up to too. What a thrill for our friends at Stretton Manor Barn who kicked off the year in style by bringing home the win for Best Barn Wedding Venue in the UK!
It may have been bitterly cold way back in January, but the blue skies and the winter sun shone brightly for a trip to London for an event at the House Of Lords. A part of a cohort of small businesses invited to meet the then Small Business Minister Kevin Hollinrake, courtesy of Small Business Britain, this was a brilliant opportunity to network with people from far outside our normal territory.
January’s pace was not ready to stop just yet either, with the launch of a Cook Book by our friends at HECK, who brought all those delicious social media posts to the kitchen worktops of fans across the UK bringing breakfast, lunch and dinner inspo to the nation.
Mr Fothergill’s launched a new line in their Children In Need fundraising range, bringing the joy of gardening to young families in the hope of nurturing a lifelong passion for gardening, but also to raise funds for the charities that BBC Children In Need supports 💚💚💚💚💚
The weather in 2024 has been awful. Being rurally located, we are governed to an extent by the weather gods, especially when it gets wet or cold and icy. In early February we had perils from the snow gods including getting completely snowed in at the office one day, but released by evening as a quick thaw followed the inches of snow that fell.
It would also be safe to say that 2024 was typified by rain, cold weather, overnight cold snaps and attacks of slugs, all of which have been felt keenly by gardeners across the country this year, depressing the gardening industry and it’s ability to sell products.
As we make our way towards Christmas, the snows have hit hard again, but it is always rather lovely here when the crisp winter sunshine comes along. And as for the gardening, there is always next year!
We book-ended the year with social media workshops in March and October for our old friends and colleagues at Visit Peak District & Derbyshire. Funded by High Peak Borough Council, we delivered social media workshops in Buxton, New Mills and Glossop to help creative businesses in this area learn more about getting the most from their social media efforts. With the authoring of a toolkit to download too, this has left a legacy that will stand the small businesses who took part in good stead for some time yet to come. Plus we got to meet some amazing people to boot!
It’s always a pleasure and never a pain to gather where all the gardening folks gather, and so being newly accepted into the Gardening Media Guild, the absolute best first place to go was the Garden Press Event in Islington one cold and grey February day.
What is never a pleasure and is always a pain is making the journey home north again after its over. Long and cold queues of people waiting to get transported out of London again are always a depressing sight to pop out of the top of the elevator to see!
Let’s get one thing straight. We are not professional photographers, but we do have a camera and will travel and can take a decent shot when needed. So when the photographer dropped out for the FSB Bootcamp event in the spring, FSB Development Manager, James Illsley asked us to step in and we got snapping away at the Peak Edge Hotel on the hilltops above Chesterfield capturing the moments in the room.
Have you heard of babysitting a Google Ads account? That’s what we’ve been doing for quite some time for our friends at Big Green Smile, stepping in to cover holiday absences of the incumbent Google Ads manager at BGS. And it’s no small feat with responsibility for 6 accounts across 2 platforms, in 4 languages and 2 currencies.
And so when the Google Ads chap moved on to pastures new, we were asked to take on the accounts going forwards, and that’s what we’ve been doing ever since. We’ve had a few ‘best ever’ months in the year to date and have enjoyed a thrilling ride, shaping inbound performance marketing for the brand since then. Yay! 🍾
Our fab friends at GT Couriers specialise in white glove, handballed, chilled, hung and other special deliveries. Where all other courier companies turn down jobs for being too hard, GT Couriers will get the job done. And so it was wonderful to hear them being recognised as logistics champions in their supply chain. Yay 🥳
Where to start in unpicking all that our friends at Baker Consultants have been up to this year? Should we start with the ECO Chamber podcast? Andrew Baker’s inclusion in the prestigious ENDS report? Or being featured in the Guardian, BBC Newsround and BBC 5 Live for the first launch news about their soil acoustics research work. How about the thrilling ride of working with dairy farming giants such First Milk and Yeo Valley, or of working with the Devonshire Group & Ruinart’s champagne vineyards? Whatever tale we choose to tell you, we can assure you it won’t be boring, and the team don’t let the grass grow under their feet. We’re already strapping in for the thrilling ride that 2025 is going to bring.
Arts Derbyshire is a constant that has been a part of our lives for many years, and long may it continue. Now formed as a charity, the task of fundraising lands in the lap of the Charity Director, Stephen Munn, and the Board of Trustees, chaired by Debi Hedderwick. An inaugural fundraiser event was held in April in the atmospheric venue of Masson Mills in Cromford, and it was a wonderful bringing together of artists from across the county, who represented lots of disciplines.
Our role was to make as much noise as possible for the event, and our apprentice Ed set to work, pulling together content for the website, for email and for social media to keep momentum going. The results of our efforts paid dividends, with us reaching so many people with so much content! A fun ride that has also fed into Ed’s End Point Assessment portfolio too. So you could say that we killed two birds with one stone!
HECK don’t like to rest on their laurels and are constantly shifting and innovating, tweaking their offering, their positioning and testing new markets. This year they dropped a bomb or two, in the form of a new format of filled meatballs with their Sausage Bomb Range, that hit the shelves of supermarkets at the same time as another new product development idea, in the form of their Pork & Chicken Sausage Rashers. And what’s more, these new products were the vehicle for ushering in a brand refresh to help reassert their dominance in the aisles of supermarkets across the UK. Boom 💥 what do you think of that?
We were honoured to be asked to help the Peak District National Park Authority with the promotion of their Bike Hire Centres for the 2024 season. We’ve spent time visiting, walking, and of course cycling on the trails to capture content for the centres at Ashbourne, Parsley Hay and Derwent bike hire centres. And if you haven’t heard of the off-road level cycle trails network maintained by PDPNA, then you ought to correct that right away and pay one of the centres a visit for the perfect day out in the fresh air 🚲
There is a thrill every year walking into the grounds of RHS Chelsea Flower Show in what is the most prestigious event in the horticultural calendar… across the world! In 2023 we were representing 5 clients at the show, including working on two show gardens on Main Avenue. This year we returned to work with 3 of the clients in our portfolio – Mr Fothergill’s, Griffin Glasshouses and Haws Watering Cans – and although our workload was lighter, the pace was just the same as Chelsea always brings. We love Chelsea 💚
The highlight of Chelsea this year just had to be spending time on the National Garden Scheme show garden, that took the most coveted spot on the corner of the north end of Main Avenue this year. Designed by Chelsea veteran, Tom Stuart-Smith, in collaboration with his son who produced an amazing garden building for the garden, spending time chatting to them about their garden and the charity they were supporting with its creation was a huge treat. What better cherry on top of the cake then than capturing this moment where MD Linda Lane presented Griffin Glasshouses biggest ever donation to Tom and NGS Chair Rupert Tyler? Amazing 🤩
Whilst the thrills and spills of Main Avenue were playing out, we also scooted around the corner and into the artisan gardens side of Chelsea Flower Show. Visitors this year will not have missed the brightest shining star in the Houseplant section in the form of the Plants By There garden. Designed by James Whiting, he brought colour and joy to what is sometimes a gloomy place under a canopy of trees to the East side of the Chelsea show ground. And why were we there? To check out the dozens and dozens of hand painted watering cans and plant pot covers that had been supplied to the garden by our friends at Haws Watering Cans of course! Aren’t they fab?
We love the team at Arts Derbyshire and we live and breath the brand. So this Arts Council grant application win was amazing news to receive back, where it will be used to engage local artists from the county to bring an exciting programme of events to the people that live here. Watch this space as the events near as we will be getting our sleeves rolled up as we get involved in helping spread the word as far and wide as we can.
Weiss Technik are a client we’ve been working with for some time, working behind the scenes to help them develop their Hubspot database, their content and email marketing, reaching out to sectors as diverse as automotive and aerospace, manufacturing and engineering, medical and pharma, and research and development. Backed by German technology, you might not have heard of them unless you are in the environmental simulation space, but they’re a pretty big deal and have been producing solutions for British businesses for quite a number of years too, celebrating their 25th anniversary in 2024. Happy birthday folks, and let’s raise a glass to the next 25 years 🥂
Haws Watering Cans is the oldest watering can company in the world, still making cans today in the UK to the same rigourous standards of the original long-reach cans. Hot on the heels of a very colourful RHS Chelsea Flower Show appearance, they have launched a range of indoor cans for houseplant enthusiasts who want their watering can to be pretty enough to leave out with the plants! Check out the range on the Haws website.
Gary Barlow became an overnight sensation on TikTok with *everyone* talking about it, earlier this year. Debbie is often asked to join BBC Radio to comment on social media buzz, and so it was that one fine morning she ended up on BBC Radio Nottingham explaining exactly how Gary Barlow found himself on everyone’s lips that week.
As former winners at the StartUp Awards a couple of years ago, Debbie has spent the last couple of years acting as a judge for new aspirants entering these business awards. It’s no mean feat and with over 40 entries to read, score and arrange in order, this act of giving back was quite an undertaking, but time gladly spent encouraging the newest batch of small businesses entering the scene.
In a busy, busy schedule, we also managed to squeeze in a new client in the form of the Peak District Business Hub. We are based at the Peak District National Park Headquarters, and with some amazing rooms lying empty, and a local need for a touchdown centre to get some super-fast broadband and a quiet place to work, this coworking space was born. We put together a launch event, a new website and booking system and got the engines running on their social media and helped the folks at the Authority bring this new small business facility to the local business community. And you really ought to take a look, because it’s beautiful.
We’ve been involved in helping out with the local well dressing for the last few years, and so this year was a really special one for us, as the well dressing committee decided to support Arts Derbyshire and SHE UK, two charities that we hold very dearly to our hearts. We ended up donating £300 to each charity through takings during the week of the well dressing, which SHE UK ended up doubling by taking the well dressing donation during their Big Give fundraising week later in the year. It’s been amazing to bring support for this local heritage craft and charities we support together in one activity this year.
A-maze-ing! If you keep an eye on our socials, you might have spotted a couple of Reels showing off the delicious evening spent at a Stretton Manor Barn Prosecco evening. Where work becomes play, sampling the most delicious food ever, and the whole venue was turned into one big party as couples congregated to taste menus for their own big party.
It was wonderful to take the call one summer’s morning asking if we might like to speak on digital marketing for the High Peak Business Club’s Big Buxton Business Breakfast. The High Peak Business Club is convened by none other than Edwina Currie, and she helped bring together a big crowd that day to the Buxton Crescent, hosted by the Buxton Crescent Heritage Trust. The breakfast was amazing, the venue fabulous (really fabulous!), and the assembled crowd was attentive. Debbie and Ed had a great time!
We like to give back wherever we can and so when we got a call from Jess’ parents asking if we would host Jess for the Lady Manners School work week, we looked at our packed diary, closed the diary in shock at how packed it was and then said yes anyway! The advantage of having such a lot happening already in the week that Jess joined us was that she got to sit in on, and experience, a huge variety of things we get up to as a consultancy. The pace is always quick, the jobs and tasks are always varied and there is never a dull moment. Jess presented us with a beautiful bouquet of flowers at the end of the week, and she left a legacy in the form of this blog too, so read it!
We’ve attended the Mr Fothergill’s Press Day for years and years now, and our return visits are amazing for being able to prowl the flowers and veg rows growing out on the trials field, but also for an annual chance to catch up with this man, Brian Talman. For many years the Trials Ground manager, he now has one foot in retirement as Lou has taken over the full management task. The things that Brian doesn’t know about plants, propagation, seed germination, compost, horticultural care (you get the picture) is not worth knowing. We spent some time reflecting on the drone work we carried out in 2023 to capture the space, and have presented it here for you in this blog if you would care to check it out (it’s amazing, you should).
Our friends at Potteries Auctions have a fascinating job. They never know what’s going to come through their doors in a box, and over the years there have been so many curiosities with really interesting back stories. One such auction lot that came in helped them to set a house record this year, as a very desirable rare coin fetched a £45,000 hammer price 🤯
September is a back-to-school time, and it’s also a time to get back to business after a summer interlude for a lot of businesses. Debbie has been a part of the Peak District Partnership for a couple of years, who convene an annual Think Tank meeting on different topics that address the needs of small businesses in the area. This year’s theme was ‘digital’, a very broad church and for people living and working in the Peak District this means ‘getting decent broadband’ whilst the rest of the country is much further down the digital adoption line with smart cities and digital stoking a great number of systems and processes to make life easier, quicker, smoother and cheaper. And so the main topic of discussion was around the disablers for digital adoption and planning how the great and the good assembled in the room could help address those issues.
Hotly anticipated every year is the return of two old favourites from the HECK limited edition range. So when the team at HECK cleaned down the lines and set up a short run of Halloweiner and Guy Porks sausages this autumn it was not surprising that the short runs ran out in double quick time. We shall have to plan for double or triple the quantities next year!
The Palace Hotel in Buxton has felt like a second home this year. Having delivered workshops there for Visit Peak District & Derbyshire earlier in the year, it was a return for the Business Peak District Annual Conference and a chance to check out other rooms in the newly refurbished hotel. Debbie joined a panel of experts answering delegates questions on the local small business skills shortages in the region. It was a forum for some robust debate on the challenges we face, and a call to arms to influencers in the room to help us make a plan to address the issues.
By now the end of the year was on the horizon, so a trip to London, bedecked in all it’s shiny Christmas glory was in order for us to take our seats with lots of other hopefuls for the British Business Awards 2024 where we were shortlisted for the SME Marketing Agency of The Year.
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