Tax Adviser, 3rd March 2010
The South Wales Ladies Business Club was launched in December 2006 by CTA member Alison Hazledine and two of her friends, Rebecca Collins of Handelsbanken and Melanie Hamer of Wendy Hopkins Family Law Practice. The club was set up to provide an informal and relaxed forum to give female professionals the opportunity to build a network with like-minded ladies for the benefit of their business.
The club started with just 20 ladies and now has 550 influential businesswomen on its database. The club continues to grow, and the success is clearly attributable to there being a strong demand for business ladies to network in a relaxed and friendly forum.
Events are held in the first week of each month and there is a Gala Charity Dinner every year in January. There is usually no formal agenda, enabling ladies to maximise the time for networking, and there are no requirements for formal membership and no annual fee. Any business ladies can attend the networking events on a “pay as you go” basis.
The South Wales Ladies Business Club knows that many ladies have a busy working life, so attendance is not expected at every event and ladies are free to attend as few or as many as suits their diary.
The Club saw a gap in the market in 2007 for a female networking club as an alternative to the normal networking events, which are sometimes dominated by men. However, many of its attendees and its organisers also attend the usual mixed networking events, and this is most definitely not a feminist splinter group!