The West Midlands Women’s Business Centre - helping women in the West Midlands to start and grow their businesses.

The WM WBC is the first of the national women’s business centres to be launched in the Government’s Enterprise Strategy.

The Business Centre is designed to encourage more women to seriously consider setting up their own businesses by providing a wealth of expertise, help and online training to help them take the first crucial steps.

Business growth is also a major role of the Women’s Business Centre, providing effective and comprehensive business support, helping female entrepreneurs to take advantage of online training and mentoring to enable them to build their businesses.

The West Midlands Women’s Business Centre, in recognition of the fact that women generally are able to share problems and network effectively, provide a series of online forums which are utilised to the full by business women in the West Midlands.

The active online community is helping female business owners to make contact with each other, offer mutual support and advice as well as share opportunities. The site offers free access to a range of online training, services, networks and local and national business support information.

Women’s Business Development Agency director Sally Arkley (right) has indicated that the website is part of a wider drive to encourage more women to set up their own businesses.

“In this climate it is not only important but vital to support women who want to start a business, not just as a social aim but also as an economic imperative,” she said. “Women are part of the economic solution to this crisis.”

It also offers a library of fact sheets, case studies, research, newsletters and other business support tools such as business plan templates, market research questionnaires, cash flow forecasting, and confidence building.

The Women’s Enterprise Centre of Expertise are West Midlands Women’s Business Centre partners.

Director Jackie Brierton said: “Self-employment gives women more flexibility. It’s not an easy option but they can fit a business around family responsibilities. A lot of women will start a business part-time and grown it over a period of years and these small part-time businesses can be the big businesses of the future.

"We find women are coming up with more and more innovative ideas for business and drawing away from the traditional areas of retail and catering and going into areas like digital for example.”