Tenant Directory
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When I arrived at The Business Village, I was welcomed by Laura Morris who gave me a short tour of the building and introduced me to the team. I then had an overview of what it is like in reception by being talked through the steps of Laura’s Monday morning -for example, responding to emails. After this, the chief executive of the Business Village (Martin Beasley) brought me to a meeting room where he talked me through his role and the strategic business plan of 2025-30. This is the aim of becoming a sustainable business centre, it has three main categories: modernisation and repurposing of facilities, delivery and implementation of business support products at local, regional and national levels and creating positive social and environmental effects. This can be seen in the image below.
In the afternoon, I was given the important job of creating a spreadsheet based on some data from the past few years of statistics from the website: how many profile views there was per month, how many calls were made etc. Myself and Kevin Steel ( business development manager) looked at this data to see what information we could extract from it. Throughout the day I assisted reception with some admin tasks e.g. delivering the post.
On my second day, I attended the weekly meeting which involved looking back on the weeks financial, marketing, maintenance and tenant overview which helped me realise the extent of how much goes into the business village After this, I sat with Kevin Steel as he had a meeting booked with an interesting divorce lawyer Rebecca Baker. They spoke about holding a clinic to spread awareness of a nearby solicitor that could help any tenants in the building in need of some legal help.
When I got back from lunch, I helped the reception staff by calling some of the tenants( business owners) to let them know a parcel has been delivered. This was beneficial because it was taking me out of my comfort zone. I was given the task to create an article about my week at the Business Village. This brought me to the end of the day.
In the morning, I helped restock the cleaning products with Laura. This showed me the wide variety of tasks she takes responsibility for in her role of senior administrative and financial officer. I was then called up to the management office where I met Kevin for a teams meeting about the Net Zero project (a project that states the total emissions of carbon released by human activity is counterbalanced by an equal amount of carbon removal) and they discussed the progress that has occurred since they last spoke.
After this, there was another meeting with Florence Cooper-Smith ( the marketing officer) about the improvements of the website that could happen to make it a better place. This told me that there are always tweaks that can be made to update a website. Next, I stayed in reception and was shown how post is labelled to be sent off and how invoices are done.
On the fourth day, I started by transferring some posters on an upcoming event on how to harness the power of AI into the Bistro so that the tenants are aware of it. Then I joined Kevin Steel in a meeting with the charity Barnsley CVS. This charity provides support to the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise Sector : this includes training, developing partnerships, distributing grants, representation, sharing information and communication. They spoke about the part that the Business Village has in Net Zero and watched some case studies found on YouTube of how they are reducing certain places’ carbon footprint.
Later in the day, Kevin found out his email had been hacked. He found this out because many of his colleagues checked in as it was a strange email to receive from Kevin. This told me that this can happen to anyone at any time and the impact it has. I was given a task to create a leaflet of my journey at The Business Village on an app called Canva. Then, I travelled around all 4 buildings, delivering leaflets into the post-boxes.
Day Five was my last day at The Business Village. I started by sitting with Louise in reception and overlooked her doing some tasks. I was then given the job to put employee exit files onto the one drive, with some assistance. Then I went up to the management office and finished my post and Canva leaflet.
