Supporter / Facilitator / Youth worker
Facilitator.
Description of your role
Providing enterprise support and job coaching support to people with learning disabilities.
Previous experience in enterprise development
Personal experience of enterprise development and support for an entrepreneur who set up gift business.
Entrepreneur
E always found school hard. Her teachers said she couldn’t concentrate and that she wasn’t interested in school work.
When she left school, she tried college, but again she found this very difficult.
After leaving college, she found herself a job, in fact quite a lot of jobs. E.
E was great at interviews, and learning the job, but her employers’ said that she didn’t concentrate and they couldn’t keep on.
E was often upset, she felt people didn’t understand her and that she was a failure.
E has ADHD-PI and Dyslexia.
Field of Business
Hair extension and beauty business.
The main offer is hair extensions, but she will be looking at providing gel nails and selling her own brand of hair.
Case Study:
E had started to provide hair extensions, but had few customers and no business set up. Enterprise, helped to gather a small support group around E, apply for funding for on-going support for the business areas that E finds difficult to do.
E had attended a day course with a friend and found that she was not only captivated by hair but was also actually very good at it. As she was having issues in keeping a job and she had a young family, the hobby grew very quickly into a business idea.
The business is in the early trading stages.
E has lots of ideas and will sometimes run with an idea that isn’t always good business sense.
Curbing her enthusiasm can be difficult. The support group can sometimes be difficult to reach and they can leave too many things to me.
The parts that talk about the support network’s role and the Facilitator role. As a Facilitator you can feel like you should fix everything and it’s good to be reminded that the entrepreneur has a network for practical support.
Practically- I had used some work books produced by Mutually Inclusive which were very helpful in supporting E to develop her business idea. Will something like this be available alongside the course? As this might give new Facilitators a format to follow.
What are your plans for the future ?
1 month
- Sort a finance managing system- support (ATW funding) 2. Source additional training for filler service 3. Source cleaner 4. Social media (training)
6 month
- Do filler training -Lashes or nails 2. Equipment for filler services 3. Advertising 4. Diversity and Equal opps course 5. Film about E
12 month
- Certificate for Weaving 2. Train the trainer (sector spec) 3. Dev a training plan for a personal training session 4. Dev on-line training course 6. Look at selling own branded hair
Country
UK.
