A quick New Year chat with Bdaily business manager Andrew Carter

Welcome back to Bdaily as we kick off 2022.

Our business manager Andrew Carter chatted to correspondent Matthew Neville about the year gone, and some of the exciting things coming your way in the year ahead.

“I’ve been with Bdaily since September 2020 - it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster given the situation with the COVID-19 pandemic, lockdowns, restrictions and the huge impact it’s had on businesses of all shapes and sizes.

“I can’t think of many people who could honestly say “It’s not really affected me or my business” and that the last couple of years have been anything other than challenging. But we all love a challenge, right?”

“Looking back, I’ve been amazed at how the business community here in the North East of England(where Bdaily are based) and beyond have rolled with the many, many punches that have been thrown their way, rallied around each other, found new ways to work, innovate, collaborate, respond and even flourish given the situation.”

From the North East we saw recruitment drives across the region, local celebrities backing local businesses, tiny craft gin bars and a lot of investment into the region.

Yorkshire was all about new homes, the staycation boom and successes for independent retailers.

In London we saw a growing interest in CBD products and companies, an increase in demand for health and fitness services, and businesses looking to expand from the city to the rest of the country.

Some of the bigger national news stories of the year included support for smaller residential developers, investment into green transport and renewable energy, growth for a UK hospitality company and unsurprisingly a lot of stories around the continuing COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on businesses and employees.

Our most read story of the year centred around UK based cryptocurrency firm Argo Blockchain making moves towards producing “green Bitcoin” using only clean energy.

We’ve seen plenty of conversations around hybrid working and getting back into the office, the “new normal”, Net Zero, and Peer Networks along with sustainability, the emergence of NFTs, and the current state of the retail industry.

2021 certainly kept us busy at Bdaily. We’ve continued to publish the business news our audience wants whilst succeeding from a commercial perspective despite the challenges we’ve faced. We’ve upped our revenue by 30 per cent and welcomed new team members across the business.

Austen Shakespeare and Matthew Neville have joined our editorial team, whilst we partnered with the University of Sunderland’s graduate internship scheme to bring in our Marketing Executive, Hannah Phipps.

Late in the year Ashleigh Male joined our commercial team and is dying to talk to you in 2022 about where Bdaily can help you reach our audience.

We gained two new commercial partners during 2021 in Darlington based PR firm Harvey & Hugo and the University of Sunderland’s Enterprise and Innovation Directorate who joined our long term partners the North East Local Enterprise Partnership and the North East Business and Innovation Centre and we hope to see more businesses joining up with us for 2022.

We worked with some great businesses in 2021, helping them to access our business focussed audience including Invest North East England, Newcastle University, Enterprise Nation, Haines Watts Chartered Accountants, The Association for Project Management, Transmit Startups, The North of Tyne Combined Authority, Weightmans, and Newcastle Airport amongst many others.

“All in all, 2021 was a challenge but one that many businesses, Bdaily included, have faced with the positivity, resilience and professionalism that was needed to get us through.”

Find out Andrew’s thoughts on the coming year in part II of our chat later this week on Bdaily.