Yesterday we celebrated the second anniversary of the Winchester Business Centre. One year on from our somewhat disheartening flood we are once again a thriving business hub and we continue to welcome a great range of new businesses through our doors. At the grand old age of two we are the proud home of a legal social enterprise, an independent PR agency, an app development company and many more! We are really proud of what the Winchester Business Centre has achieved; we truly feel that we are providing a vital service that was absent from the city centre previously – a space to give small businesses the opportunity to ease into the world beyond the home office. Some of our businesses will stay with us for years but we have been thrilled to wave some off into the wider world as well.
Our two most notable success stories are of course Chris Buckingham, one of the very first users of the centre who recently published Crowdfunding Intelligence his second book exploring this exciting new sector and who was one of the key speakers at the recent Winchester Business Exhibition. Our second major success story is Kit McGinnity of Melior Advisors who originally left the centre for Winchester offices in the Jewry Street area of the city but who, we recently received word, will be moving on again to London offices. These two success stories may be the most easily quantifiable but in truth we know that many small businesses have benefited from our services from networking to hot-desking and we are thrilled to continue to offer this support.
Yesterday we gathered our friends and colleagues to celebrate our achievements, sharing delicious cake sourced from The Corner House, a much loved local café and bar while we showed off the excellent new photos of our home city as taken by the excellent local photographer Joe Low. Local is a part of what we do best at the business centre. We exist to encourage local businesses to grow, we run networking seminars to allow local businesses to meet and work together and of course the business centre is the home of the BID, an organisation which exists solely to ensure that the local business community remains positive whether that be through initiatives to drive down crime, ensure that the city is well promoted or just generally beautify things with the hanging baskets that are currently adorning the buildings of the city centre.
All in all we considered our birthday a chance to truly celebrate our success and look forward to many more years of the Winchester Business Centre.
