What We Love About Our Business!

As Valentine’s Day approaches and February is known as the month of love – or historically a month of ‘new beginnings’ – we’re asking business owners in our community to share why they love their business.

Today we talk to Danielle Holmes, managing director of Black Nova Designs, based in Calne and providing services across the UK. Black Nova are an award-winning website design and hosting company supporting over 300 new clients in the last year alone with anything from small blogs to corporate ecommerce sites. The company is one of the few qualified Ubiquiti Wifi optimisation specialists in the area and can make your wifi stretch across your home, barn, business, office or garden offering a guaranteed service with reliable coverage. 

What do you love about running your own business? 

1. Seeing client’s success, a new website can often be a big investment and when we see clients success grow from strength to strength from a website we created it is truly the best feeling. 

2. Wifi – a quote from a client, “you have genuinely saved our marriage!”, that’s got to be one of the best types of feedback yet! 

3. I love being able to take initiative, explore ideas, and empower team members to do the same. It is especially rewarding when my position allows me to turn those ideas into something that can make a difference for the business, our customers, and our employees.

What do you love about your business community? 

The support, we have been incredibly lucky from the moment we started to know all of our clients and surrounding family and friends have been incredible. In Wiltshire we have an abundance of business community networks and groups that you know will always be there for you for advice, support, and encouragement. 

What do you love socially/geographically about your community? 

As a team we all enjoy the outdoors, forest walking and camping. 

We have some incredible walks not far away from us, The Ridgeway and Barbury to name a few favourites. 

There is also the men of the team that very much enjoy computer gaming and are avid gamers in their spare time.

While we are locked down – name any business you have ‘loved’ and bought from in your community over the last few months? 

1. Tara Punter Coaching – the best coach, friend and support a business could ever wish for, https://www.tarapuntercoaching.co.uk/

2.Olivia from The Tweed Boutique, this lady keeps me warm with her incredible snoods and capes but also has provided years of support and we absolutely love the products - https://thetweedboutique.co.uk/

3. And a personal one, Claire Warman who we contacted after searching for a physio for our elderly cat. Our cat can be particularly unkind when in pain and most vets refuse to help without sedation, but Claire really gave us hope that with physio he can continue to get old and be pain free https://www.clairewarman.co.uk/

February 17 is Random Acts of Kindness Day – have you carried out any random acts of kindness (business or otherwise) over the last few months? 

We were and still are offering free laptops to our local school, we are asking if anyone has any old laptops, they would like to donate please feel free to call us, they will need dropping off to us, we will then factory wipe them, upgrade them with SSD hard drives where required and hand them to the local schools to enable children who are unable to purchase new laptops to be able to start learning from home. 

Has anyone shown kindness to you? 

Rosie at Bloc-o-choc has been incredible, always helping with our orders, sending us the most incredibly yummy gifts and being an all-around lovely business to deal with. We only started working with Rosie late last year, but her support, reliability and chocolate is the incredible. https://blocochoc.co.uk/

Sharing chocolate gifts is always in a win right?! 

Is Valentine’s Day a key moment in your business? 

Yes, it is Kyle’s birthday! Kyle founded the company back in 2012 so we very often celebrate with a business competition. The prize is undecided at the moment, but keep an eye on our social media for the ‘guess the age’ annual competition.

In the yearly cycle of your business – what do you expect during February? 

In a yearly cycle our busiest time for all services we offer is November through to March, it then quiets down over spring and summer. 

We often are still booked with a wait time, but we often notice the ‘urgency’ and client expectations and time frames become much more realistic and calm over spring and summer. 

This has been a trend for the past four years that winter is our busiest times of year for websites, wifi and laptop, pc and mac repairs and in the summer, even prior to COVID summer is our quietest time of year in general.

What would your advice be to a business owner who is feeling ‘flat’ in February? 

Keep going, do not lose sight of how far you have come. 

Create a vision board, have goals, create a network of supports. 

When you do have a ‘down’ day don’t be afraid to allow yourself that day, turn everything off and take time out – you can not pour from a empty cup so take time to recharge and then come back with ambition and drive to create the business of your dreams. 

And finally: 

As a business we are looking forward to seeing what 2021 has to bring, the new challenges, new clients and no doubt new technology.

For more information visit www.blacknovadesigns.co.uk