With the upcoming arrival of Wills and Kate’s royal baby, it’s no surprise the nation has gone a little baby mad. From fashion designers creating maternity wear fit for a princess to toy brands introducing royal baby souvenirs – let’s face it we are all a little excited! Whether you are a blossoming mother-to-be, or you simply want to get involved with the regal celebrations, why not, like Kate, host your own Royal Baby Shower?
At any baby shower, the cake is always the centrepiece of the celebration. To make sure …

CEME Innovation Centre guest speaker Fiona Nicolson, Intellectual Property expert at Bristows, outlines a guide to managing IP for small businesses.
Does your business understand and manage its IP effectively? If the answer is ‘no’, then you could be running the risk of not only losing out on a range of commercial opportunities, but also inadvertently infringing other peoples IP rights.
Intellectual Property, which Mark Getty characterised as “the oil of the 21st Century”, represents one of the biggest challenges and opportunities facing businesses in the manufacturing and engineering sectors today.  It …

Acquisition is the most time consuming and costly part of any business, but loyalty schemes are costly too – and without customers your business won’t succeed. Follow this unique easy business model guide to learn how to keep your customers happy without having to invest a fortune. Susannah Schofield shares her bespoke SPEND AGAIN business model to allow you to capitalise on the benefit of a repeat purchase.
When you run a business, no matter what size there are a few things that are always consistent. No matter what you sell, …

One more work from home opportunity is to become a market researcher for a mystery shopping company. You are self employed and the amount of work you get depends on your motivation and the amount of work each company has on. You can register with several at a time. You won’t make a fortune doing this, but will earn a few quid an hour, get travel expenses, and may enjoy some free meals. You may be asked to check certain details with a shop ororder something in particular, and you …

 
Finding a place to draw the line between your home and work life becomes significantly more complicated when it all happens in the same place. Despite the increased convenience that persuades us to ditch the office for the kitchen table, knowing when to switch off – and when to switch on – becomes a lot harder to define. To help you perfect the balancing act, take a look at these three golden rules for working from home.
1. Stick to the schedule
Working from home can be a complete joy, especially on …

Brain injury explained – the effects and spotting the signs. Find out more here.

The quest for improved work-life balance reveals the budding entrepreneur in three quarters of working mums
Research released today, by Swedish clothing company me&i reveals that, given the right business idea, nearly three quarters (73%) of working mums would leave the financial security of their current employment for a more entrepreneurial life – in order to give them the freedom to spend more time with their family.
Of the 1,500 working mothers who took part the survey, conducted by OnePoll, 64% have taken steps to improve their work-life balance since having children, …

Read more about convincing your employer to let you work flexibly.

Cake Pops have now become an extremely popular party treat, perfect for children’s parties. A fun alternative to cakes and cupcakes, cake pops are presented on a lollipop stick and decorated with everything from fondant and chocolate icing to sprinkles and chocolate chips, and are increasingly becoming the ultimate sweet party treat.
To help create your own great cake pops, cake decorating suppliers www.MakeBake.co.uk, have kindly shared their top tips for baking and decorating perfect party cake pops.
To create fun Cake Pops, you will need;

Cake Mix of your choice
Cake pop Baking …

Joni Farthing, the sixty three year-old founder and director of Women Outside The Box (WOTB) has just gone live on crowd-funding website Seedrs.com to try and raise the £60,000 she needs to take her festival of female entrepreneurship nationwide. Before trying crowd-funding, Joni used her pension to fund the first WOTB festival and learnt how to use twitter to get over 700 women to attend.
Joni first realised the power of the crowd in the early 1970’s when she chaired the fourth International Women’s Conference. Many of the Spanish women in …