12 Prizes given away in our Birthday Bash today

£1000s worth of business and enterprise support prizes just given away…

I thought I’d write a short post to reflect on Development in Social Enterprise’s birthday celebration today.

We had 12 business and enterprise support social enterprises from across the west midlands donating prizes and attending our birthday celebration event at lunch time today. The concept was to give presents on our birthday rather than receive them, but thanks to those who gave us a Birthday  card. When we asked social enterprises for donations we didn’t have to ask too hard, which is a testament to the sector, in fact I don’t think any I approached said no.

Prizes were donated from:

• www.missmacaroon.co.uk
• www.disability.co.uk
• www.bitc.org.uk
• www.colebridgecommunications.co.uk
• www.andybeatonconsultancy.org.uk
• www.socialenterprisemark.org.uk
• www.harrisaccountancy.co.uk
• www.blazefm.co.uk
• www.developmentkeys.org.uk
• www.dynamicmarketing.org.uk
• www.cosialmediamarketingmadeeasy.co.uk
• www.imrcl.org.uk

45 social entrepreneurs running large and small organisations, some new start-ups, some older more established organisations came to celebrate and potentially win one of the fabulous prizes that had been donated. The organisations could only win if they could demonstrate they were a social enterprise.

Prizes were randomly selected with a luck of the draw, but even more exciting was individuals could only win once and were encouraged to only enter into prizes that they could and would use. So in some cases the odds were as low as evens and led to a few being plucked out of the hat more than once. Of course the rules were that you could only win once so they were then discarded.. All I can say here is it seems if your name is Phil… you’re lucky, or have a strategy of entering for prizes that others don’t want and the odds are low.

The social enterprises and like-minded organisations above donated prizes and we were even able to contract and buy from two social enterprise who catered for the event. Concept Conference Centre provided the main lunch and Devenish Girl Bakery provided a selection of freshly backed cakes…

The Birthday cake provided by Concept was tucked into [it was so good] before we had chance to cut it, so that must mean it was a great event all round…

We’ll be following up the winners in the near future to see how the prizes support their development over the coming months and Blaze FM has interviewed all the winners and will be featuring these on their radio over the coming weeks, we will of course be aiming to get the pod cast too.

see also our twitter #hashtag for the day #disebday http://twitter.com/#!/search/realtime/%23disebday

All in all a social enterprise fest in Birmingham!

Thank you one and all for coming.

 

Face the Change

Just a short post to highlight a good article in BVSC’s recent edition of ‘Update’.

The article features the Disability Resource Centre [www.disability.co.uk], a medium-sized charity I’ve been working with helping them negotiate the changes, including:

• Loss of 30% of its funding
• Unexpected need to move from council premises
• Development of new trading activities

Read the BVSC article [here] and then check out our case study [here] to see how they went about facing the challenges and emerging a stronger organisation.

HMRC Don’t Know Their A from Their E

This blog post has been stirring in me for a little while now and is a bit of a rant, but I hope useful for something.

As a SFEDI qualified business adviser I help start-up social enterprise and indeed those that are well established. I therefore look out for things that will help, as many need all the help they can get. When I saw the ‘Regional Employer NICs Holiday for New Businesses’ I thought yes and [as a start-up enterprise] applied myself. So what is this scheme you ask?

In a nutshell it is a scheme that enables new businesses [in their first year] who employ people in their first year to have an employers NIC holiday for those they employ [maximum that you can hold back for each employee is £5k and up to 10 employees]. You still pay the Tax, but [subject to application] are granted an Employer’s NIC holiday and therefore hold this back.

Great so far yes, but now for the problems I’m facing:

Despite sending off the forms with all the details of what I held back [which is less than £1k] etc.. I received a letter about 4 weeks ago saying I owed this exact amount and must pay it now! So on the phone [HMRC premium rate line] I went to speak with a  nice guy who said ‘it’s probably our fault’ thought that was refreshing and it would be sorted, but no, that would be too efficeint and simple wouldn’t it?

A few days later came a message on my office phone from a uknown caller [I guessed it was the tax office] saying and I quote ‘you must call this number quoting reference xxxxxxx by a said date [two days]‘. No name, no anything else really, nice I thought, but duly called the office [premium rate number again]!

On answer, no one was able to deal with my call, ‘we’ll call you back!’ I’m going out to an appointment I said, Oh they said [like that was unusual], I’ll see if I can get someone to call back in 15 mins and someone did! But and it’s a big but, ‘we haven’t been told by the [other office that deals with NICs holiday] that you’ve sent your form in, perhaps you can call them, but rest assured we won’t be taking you to court’. Court I thought, I haven’t done anything for you to take me to court! anyway…

Now bear in mind I have now had three phone calls with the Tax office I receive another letter saying ‘previously, we treated your lack of response as an oversight. Now, if you do not pay or contact us, we will treat this as an active choice and we will start debt recovery action.’ I’m not exactly quaking in my boots, but I am now very anoyed!

So I’ve called [the office that deals with Nics holiday] this morning [premium rate number again] to be told ‘I can’t help you with that, you’ll need to speak to our ‘technical team’, they tried to put me through, no joy, tried again, no joy. ‘I’m sorry our technical team are very busy, can they call you back?’ Yes please call me back! ‘The turnaround time is 48 hours, they must be really busy then I say to myself and of course have a bit more of a whine to the person on the phone…

Whilst waiting for the technical team, I thought I’d better call the collections team to tell them again that I’m not ignoring their letter and put in a bit of a complaint and tell them I’m going to invoice for my time in sorting this out and any late payment will be treated as a ‘choice’ and interest will be added at a daily extortionate rate just like HMRC.

Now I feel a lot better having shared this with you and will now write my complaint letter. I’ll update you how I get on here, but if you’re experiencing problems with the NICs holiday then do let me know! Do also let me know if you applied and had no problems as we like to have a balanced approach with both sides of the story!