Welcome from leader of the council, Cllr Izzi Seccombe

Hello everyone. A happy and prosperous new year to all.

Welcome to the first Warwickshire Means Business of 2018 - the first of our new monthly editions.

From today we will be bringing out WMB every month to keep you right up to date with all the latest business trends, news and information about funding and the many other strands of business support available from Warwickshire County Council and our partner organisations.

Many of our partners will be represented at the fourth Warwickshire County Council Skills Conference at Stoneleigh on March 7th. We are proud that the Skills Conference has become such a significant milestone in the region's business calendar. It provides a great bridge between the worlds of business and education and I urge you to book your places as last year's very successful event was a sell-out.

Another event which has immediately established itself as a feature in the business calendar is the Coventry & Warwickshire Business Festival. The inaugural festival, in November and December, featured a brilliant series of events and it was both enlightening and inspiring to be reminded again of the breadth of enterprise and innovation possessed by this county's business community.

In this edition of WMB you can read about several examples of such enterprise, including the story of how Nuneaton-based Optical People, who have been helped by our Small Capital Grants scheme. To find out more about the Warwickshire County Council Small Capital Grant, please call us on 01926 41806.

It is no surprise that Warwickshire possesses a great reputation as a prime location for businesses, large and small, in many sectors, and at Warwickshire County Council we are doing all we can to ensure that remains the case far into the future. That future will be increasingly digital, of course, which is why the county council has thrown its weight - and investment - so strongly behind the CSW Broadband scheme which continues to go from strength to strength.

I hope you enjoy this edition of Warwickshire Means Business. The next update will be in February.