Dear Member,   

I am delighted to have been appointed the new Director of the Small Firms Association and I am very much looking forward to meeting all of our members in due course and to hearing your experiences and concerns. 

With the SFA National Small Business Awards 2018 being launched this week, I would like to encourage you to enter this important celebration of small business and their vital contribution to the Irish economy. Tune into our webinar on 14 September on how to create a winning entry. 

In this week's e-zine, we bring you details of a recent case of €825,000 awarded in a gender discrimination claim.

Each week in the SFA e-zine, we profile a different government support available to small businesses. In this edition, we focus on Enterprise Ireland's Market Access Grant, where you can get up to €150,000 to develop your strategy for a new overseas budget.

We bring you details on a public consultation launched on the dot ie domain registration policy and what it can mean for your business, and link to the Microfinance Ireland Progress report for Q2 2017. 

Don't miss your last chance to book for the 1 day Project Management course on 15 September. GDPR is one of the topics which will be covered at the upcoming SFA Employment Law Conferences taking place in Limerick on 20 September and in Dublin on 9 October. Register your place for the SFA Annual Lunch 2017 taking place in the Mansion House on 10 November.  We also provide a summary of recent press coverage. 

As always, we’d love to hear from you about any queries you may have, issues you wish to have raised with Government or other stakeholders and your ideas on how we can improve the business environment for us all. Please contact me on tel: 01 605 1602 or e-mail: sven@sfa.ie or tweet: @SFA_Irl or visit: www.sfa.ie.

Kind regards, 

Sven Spollen-Behrens

SFA Director