Women doing it for themselves when it comes to networking

Jan 28 2010 by Karen Dent, The Journal

Networking aimed solely at businesswomen in the North East is continuing to thrive despite the huge number of mixed business networking events available. Karen Dent finds out more about one women-only networking group for entrepreneurs in County Durham.

INTIMIDATING is a word that is often used when women talk about mixed – and usually male-dominated – networking events.

That’s exactly how Ann Williams-Maughan felt when she attended some general networking sessions during efforts to get her home-based enterprise better known in the business community.

“I did networking but I didn’t particularly like it, I felt a bit intimidated,” said Ms Williams-Maughan, who has run Education Takeaway, an enterprise providing learning resources for primary schools, for six years.

“Networking initially, people think, ‘I will go and hand out my business cards’ but you don’t feel you’ve got anything out of it,” she says.

With that in mind, she joined together with two friends to prevent a women’s networking group in Durham from folding after the original organiser was unable to carry on because of ill health.

FIND – Friendship In Networking Durham – was initially part of the Women Into the Network (WIN) organisation.

Ms Williams-Maughan says: “It was a cluster group set up to encourage women in business in between other activities that WIN were doing.”

WIN itself has undergone a major change in the past year. Originally set up at Durham University in 1999, the group’s initial aim was to give North East businesswomen the confidence to make their mark.

But last year the organisation underwent a shake-up to provide more services for its members and changed from being a university-run concern to a not-for-profit company, which is now known as WIN Ltd.

Like WIN, FIND is now a different proposition since Ms Williams- Maughan teamed up with her friends Maureen Storey and Valerie Palmer to take on the group just over a year ago.

“It was initially run by someone else. It would have folded if we didn’t step in,” says Ms Williams-Maughan.

“We got together and discussed what we’d like from networking and support. We meet once a month and get different people in to do a talk and we have social meetings as well – like wine tasting or going for a meal. We wanted people to build a friendship – that’s the whole ethos of it.”