AEA taster membership package

Hi, I’m Roger Lane Nott and I’m the Director General and Chief Executive of the AEA. And I am going to explain to you now the benefits of being a taster member of the AEA. So what do you get for being a taster member? Well, to start with you get access to our staff. A very experienced staff with a vast experience of time both in farming, in agricultural machinery and outdoor power, with a considerable number of expertise.

We provide statistical and economic information. That’s to make you help you make better decisions. In essence, this is market intelligence. Market intelligence that will provide you with the information that you need.

We provide technical support on a big range of items from, for example, International Standards, European legislation, British legislation, but again, this technical support will allow you to do your job, quicker, better and hopefully more accurately.

We provide legal advice. Legal advice for you as a member which may be something as simple as some query over some letter that you’ve had or some agreement, but also if somebody wants to sue you, we will help you and support you through that process. We can of course help you from being sued by somebody else.
We provide export advice, particularly for those SMEs who want to get into the export world and have not done that before. And there are a lot of you out there in that situation. We will help you go through the whole process of becoming an exporter, the huge amount of paperwork and legislation that you’ll have to go through. It’s a lot I know, but we really must try and see if we can persuade more SMEs to become exporters.

We work closely with the UK Trade and Investment, in the government, where we can help you get grants to go to overseas exhibitions and shows as well as other information and other grants that will support you in the UK.

We provide newsletters; a whole plethora of newsletters. We have an AEA Economic News and Views which is weekly and covers a vast amount of information both on economic and gossip to a certain extent, of what’s going on in the industry, covering the whole plethora from farm machinery through to outdoor power.

We also get the most up to date information we can for you and we are close to newspapers, websites and of course the Bank of England and anybody else who provides economic information. We provide also a Director General’s email which comes out every Friday afternoon and that’s very much headlines with snippets and information to send you to particular websites or other information that we think you need. And that really helps us in our role to you of being both a signpost and a watchdog. A signpost to try and tell you when things are happening so you are alerted to them and a watchdog to help you watch your back.

Finally, we offer you as a tester member discounted rates and it’s something like £500 for your first six months. But it’s all negotiable. We want you in as a member of the AEA. But above all, the biggest benefit of taster membership is networking. The ability to talk to your competitors in a free and open situation, of course, not giving away your own trade secrets, but to take views and sit round a table and discuss issues that affect the whole of the industry.

So I do hope you’ll consider becoming a taster member of the AEA. If you want more information, please go to www.aea.uk.com.