Growing your business: Finding New Markets, Partnerships and Expanding your Customer Base

Join the workshop to explore opportunities to grow your customer base, access new supply chains and find new partnerships.

Description

Are you an SME or a startup looking for ways to grow or expand your business?

Growing your customer base today requires constant review of business development strategies in securing clients, writing tenders, accessing new supply chains, and building new commercial partnerships. The London West Innovation Network’s workshop, “Growing your business: Finding New Markets, Partnerships and Expanding your Customer Base”, will bring together business leaders, industry experts, government representatives and successful entrepreneurs to explore different pathways to drive the commercial expansion of your business. 

Finding the best business opportunities and making the right decisions in every stage of growth is crucial. This session will explore what is on your doorstep and will aim to help you understand how best to prepare to engage in market opportunities as they arise, with both private and public sector agents.

The workshop will provide you with:  

  • best practices on networking and building commercial partnerships that can help you access new supply chain links and expand your customer base.
  • insights on popular portals to identify and engage with public and private sector tendering opportunities.
  • an overview of how best to demonstrate your capabilities and competitiveness, to secure the right contracts and contacts.

Speakers:

Steve Armitage and Isabelle Liu (Heathrow)

Steve is Heathrow’s Head of Innovation, with a remit to transform Heathrow through innovation and technology. Steve will provide insights on how businesses can engage better with Heathrow and its supply chain. 

Isabelle is the Supply Chain Manager of Heathrow, and leads on SME engagement and development programmes. Her focus is to reduce barriers for SME to access the opportunities and play a part in Heathrow’s supply chain and work with SMEs to drive innovation. They will talk about Heathrow Lift Off programme, a new concept developed in 2022, that provides innovative SMEs the opportunity to present their products and services to a panel made up of Heathrow and their largest supply chain partner organisations seeking potential business opportunities.

Rob Hodges (AWS)

Rob is the Amazon Head of Digital Innovation programme in the UK. He will talk about AWS’s approach to innovation and how he delivers bespoke engagements with customers. Rob has worked in innovation, insights, and strategy for 15 years and has experience in corporate innovation as Head of Innovation at Samsung Europe, and in the consulting space launching new products and services for global brands.

Rami Deen (Fujitsu)

Rami is the Head of Digital Value and Innovation Lead at Fujitsu. He has over 25 years of experience successfully delivering value management and digital transformation engagement to public and private industry clients globally. Fujitsu is dedicated to supporting SMEs by providing enhanced access channels to their network and offering exciting collaboration opportunities. Rami will talk about how Fujitsu partners with innovative SMEs to deliver new solutions and social impact, and the benefits the partnership offers for SMEs.

Tom Brooks and Ray Lavery (London Borough of Hounslow)

Tom has worked within Hounslow Council's Economic Development and Regeneration team for 8 years, overseeing numerous business support projects and leading on the Borough's Creative Enterprise Zone programme. Tom and his colleague, Ray, will talk about Hounslow’s Innovate and Grow initiative, a free business support programme and how it encouraged innovation among the businesses they supported.

Ray has been working in business for over 25 years and have worked with and helped thousands of businesses achieve success, nationally and internationally, across all industries. He provides over 15 workshops and webinars a year and speak internationally. He was also integral in developing a business support platform, mygrowthpod.com, which provides 24/7 support for thousands of businesses annually.

Annika Bosanquet (Wrapology)

Annika founded Wrapology in 2001 to work closely with brands and design to develop and manufacture their sustainable packaging solutions. Wrapology was named West London Company of the Year at the 2020 West London Business Awards. She will talk about her experiences as an established entrepreneur, and share some tips and tricks for expanding one's business.