2021 Influential Businesswoman Awards

Acquisition International - Influential Businesswoman Awards 2021 Company: Single Mums Business Network Contact: Jules Hawkins Website: singlemumsbusinessnet work.co.uk Best Independent Mums Network Director of the Year 2021 (UK): Jules Hawkins he Single Mums Business Network is a UK based private members club. Fundamentally, it has been founded to help single mothers with a strong work ethic to find themselves stable income through their chosen vocation. Due to the barriers often encountered by single parents tyring to enter salaried careers, The Single Mums Business Network – or SMBN – aims to help these parents gain exposure and reach their target market. In addition, it wishes to raise awareness to the stigma often facing single parents, dispelling the rumours that single parenthood is a work shy lifestyle and helping its communities of strong, hard-working women to maintain their ambition, professionalism, and revenue streams. In this manner, it welcomes parents of all backgrounds and business owners of all scales, working with start-ups and well-established businesses alike. All members pay the same fee, are treated equally, and SMBN itself doesn’t benefit fromany charitable income, independently doing all it can to make work work whilst educating the country’s leading minds about the lack of synergy between work and childcare. Due to its work, supporting single parents across the nation, its growth has been purely naturalistic. It sign-posts for single dads and attracts single mums as well as parents of genders in between, allowing those who need it most to find it through various networks and referrals from their friends, family members, and peers who have been helped by SMBN in the past. This has allowed it to avoid the need for upselling, and its in-print PR is included in membership; instead, it encourages its members to focus on ethics more than income within the Network, refusing to sell advertising space to companies asking women to work for free and sticking by every element of its moral code. Furthermore, its employees operate with a dedication and passion to guide every SMBN member towards greater success. Each of them being supportive, encouraging, and hardworking in and of themselves, their genuine first-hand experience of what the members will be going through helps form this network from a place of genuine understanding and knowhow regarding the difficulties of raising a young life and trying to maintain a business. It has in this way developed a method for recruiting internally, picking out the traits of T members that would work well in the team and in the support of its other service users. By recruiting based on attitude and skillset, the founder, Jules Hawkins, can be sure that each employee she recruits will be an asset to everyone within the network. Jules, therefore, takes her duty of safeguarding very seriously. As the Director of this business network, it falls to her to make sure that everyone involved is well taken care of and that the operations she puts in place are well-honed to be safe and beneficial. Acknowledging childcare as the serious topic it is, the SMBN likes to meet up with members face to face whenever they can, and has continued with this via Zoom throughout the pandemic to reassure members that whilst physical distance is more of a factor, they are still not alone in the challenges they face. This is something Jules is dedicated to ensuring continues as the SMBN moves forward towards the rest of the year and beyond. With The Single Mums Business Network having made a name for itself amongst single parents up and down the UK, its efforts have grown in notoriety in the more general sense. Jules Hawkins, the founder, is extremely proud of this; specifically, she is proud of how the organisation has grown in a natural way that has been made possible through its service users and staff, working hard to keep up its support of each single parent in its network and excited to host the next Single Mums in Business Awards next year. Sep21533