Dudley&District Business Club

Dudley & District Business Club - serving local businesses

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Chairman's Newsletter March 2011

Dear All

It has been a very busy year for the Club since I was elected Chairman last year. A mandate from Club members last November asked the committee to return the Club back to its original ethos as a support group for small businesses as opposed to a purely networking club. I have been working with the Committee to do that and look forward to your continued attendance to our meetings.

Our AGM is due to take place on 19th April at 7.30pm, please do your best to attend particularly because voting this year will take place on the night and there will be no proxy voting beforehand to make things fairer for all. Only fully paid up members are entitled to vote. Our membership year runs from January to December and as such your annual subs must be paid before you are eligible to vote. If you haven’t paid yet then please make sure that you either send your £25 annual payment to Steve Millington , The Treasurer or better still visit the website www.ddbc.co.uk and make your payment online.

Nominations for the posts of Chairman, Treasurer and Secretary are needed and you are asked to make your nominations at the meeting on 22 March. Please ensure that the person you are nominating is willing to stand for election because we have previously discovered that those nominated haven’t wanted to take a committee role.

Denise, our co-opted Secretary will issue the voting papers on the night and will have a full list of fully paid up members to ensure that only those eligible to vote may do so. .

A representative from our annual nominated charity The Pocklington Trust will be in attendance to discuss the Trust and how the Resource Centre in Stourbridge helps those who are visually impaired. It is our intention to have a raffle on the night to raise funds for this worthy cause, so please can you donate a raffle prize? Raffle prizes have been a bit thin on the ground of late which is a shame because monies raised go towards the annual charity and towards the Club for future events.

Please look at the website for details of our forthcoming events – we have managed to get some great speakers to talk to us over the coming months. On 17th May we have Andrew Nicholson and Diane Macdowall of Connect to your Potential giving a talk on Feel the Fear & Do It Anyway, you may recognise the name as this is the title of a book by Sue Jeffers and Diane Macdowall was the first person in the UK to be licensed by Sue Jeffers to deliver this talk.

On 21 June we have Sean Stevens of Dino Collections/Credit-Manager.net in Kent coming to talk to us – the title of his talk is “The Adventures of a Credit Manager and Ways of Getting Paid. Sean has spent the past 15 years in the credit and collections industry and has worked in a broad spectrum of industries. He has undertaken projects within the UK and Europe, most recently spending 6 years in Germany after setting up a shared service centre for a global IT company. Sean founded Credit-Manager.Net in 2009, a credit control outsourcing company that offers credit management consulting and training to companies throughout the UK and Europe. He is also on the board of the Association of Credit Professionals and the EMEA Credit Forum and once a year lectures at the University of the West of England on Global Credit Management. In 2010 he sponsored and presented a prize to the student who gained the highest pass mark in their Credit Management exam. He is considered to be one of the leading credit managers in Europe.

A warm welcome to our newest members Dave and Gill Tomkins, from DT Garden Services, Linda Bedall from Dudley Building Society, and Gwen and Lester Matthews from Adventure Rapport.

I would like to finish with a big thank you to the committee for all their support and hard work over the last 12 months.

I look forward to seeing you all at April’s AGM.

Mick Davies

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