The grant, available via the Learning and Skills Council and the North West Development Agency, has been introduced to support relevant and challenging learning and development activities for leaders, senior managers or key decision makers in companies across the North West.

Utilising the grant, local business leaders can benefit from The Safety Group’s practical Risk Management programme, which has been designed to increase the awareness and knowledge of the legal obligations of senior personnel within business in relation to people management and risk reduction strategies.

The Safety Group’s comprehensive programme will provide managers with the necessary skills to reduce potential risk within companies in terms of health and safety, employment law, finance, fire, security, business continuity and accident management.

Providing an element of ongoing mentoring from a fully qualified Risk Consultant, The Safety Group will bring increased awareness of risk management and the utilisation of polices and procedures to improve business quality and efficiencies.

Stuart Beaumont, co-founder and director of The Safety Group commented: “Managing a company’s risks helps to prevent accidents and ill health to workers and members of the public. Accidents and sickness can shatter lives and harm a business if productivity is hindered, equipment is damaged, insurance costs increase or court proceedings are filed.

“We are delighted to be able to tap into Government funding to support the development of the North West’s senior managers and directors. The recession saw many businesses slash training budgets but with this grant companies can now access vital training where we can help them formulate bespoke risk management strategies and actively reduce potential risk in the work place.

“Our ethos is all about practical solutions to clients’ problems with an emphasis on a hands-on service. This provides our clients with real added value to their business from a legal, insurance and commercial perspective.”

A maximum support of up to £3,000 per company is available, for up to 3 managers in organisations employing between 5 and 249 people, and 2 leaders in organisations employing 250 – 999 people.

To secure the funding businesses are required to contribute approximately 1/3 of the total training cost. For example, for a manager to receive the maximum £1,000 grant, a business must contribute £500 towards the total of the £1,500 training cost. So for an outlay of £1500 to train three managers, a company can receive an additional £3000 to support the development of its risk management.

To find out more about funding and The Safety Group’s comprehensive Risk Assessment programme, contact The Safety Group on 0845 224 7013 or email solutions@thesafetygroup.co.uk for a free consultation. Or visit www.thesafetygroup.co.uk for more information.

The Safety Group Ltd is a leading Health, Safety, Employment Law and Risk Management consultancy offering expert advice and guidance to businesses in the public and private sectors. It works with organisations, both large and small, to ensure compliance with complex legal requirements. Based in Altrincham and operating on a national level, it provides services to clients in sectors such as construction, housing, leisure, healthcare, property, engineering, manufacturing, transport, warehousing and private education.

So there will be plenty of businesses missing from our database. We do try our hardest to keep on track of this. So to help us out we’ve added “Add a business” function. At the minute its at the bottom of every search results page. We will be adding it to no-results and other pages within the next few days. I’ve created a demo video of me adding a business. See below.

You also have the choice of reviewing the business at the same time you add the details. You only have to enter minimal details for the business. So if you don’t know things like post codes, don’t worry because we double check everything added.

So if a friend writes a new review (or various other things) you will be notified instantly on your Friends Feed. We will also be sending out a daily email at the start of each day informing you of the previous days friends activity. Sometime in the next few weeks we will also be releasing email notifications so you can turn these emails off (if you like).

I’ve attached a screen-shot of the friends feed below. Alternatively just log into your user account here and see it in action.

Well i guess we’re not making things very clear. So in the next few days we will be adding a welcome note to users login section. The note (in the form of a popup) will appear when you login (see image below). We will also be including a tick box so you don’t have to keep seeing the message. We’re hoping this will help users in finding the correct path, once they’ve signed up.

In the next coming weeks a member of the GoMy team will also be releasing some news about various give-aways / competitions we have lined up for users of the site.

First off we’ve been busy putting together our “Chit Chat” section. This will be a cross between a Twitter feed and the Wall section on Facebook, for those familiar. For those of you not familiar it’s basically a section where you can inform your friends on GoMy what your up-to or you can post on your friends Chit Chat and have a less formal kind of conversation. i.e. what you up to over the weekend, that kind of thing. I’ve added a sneaky picture at the bottom so you can have a look what its like.

Other advances we are working at the minute:

• List’s – This will allow users to create and share list’s of their favourite restaurants, bars, stores etc etc.
• Email Notifications – We feel it would be nice for each user to have total control over which emails they want to receive from GoMy.

Along with the new things mentioned above, we will also be working on fixing any other outstanding problems and also working on speed issues. I would like to thank everyone who’s signed up for a user account and had a look around the site and a special thanks for those who’ve reported any errors / problems. We really appreciate your patience, while the site is still in beta.

• Site performance. Speed Speed Speed. We know things are not lightning quick, but don’t worry it will be soon enough.
• The search results. We’ve still got tweek’s to do on the results, to deliver better and more relevant searches. This will always be ongoing.
• Mapping function. Same again something we will always be working on.

I’ll be adding another post in about a day or so regarding new features we have planned for users. For now it would be great if you could have a look around the site and let us know what you think.

If you have some time maybe add a review or 10 and if you come across any minor problems then it would be appreciated if you could report them here

Let’s hope our launch goes better than these guys.