Today, I want to tell you a personal story of doing new things, taking risks, being innovative and being willing to fail in the quest to create something of value for my business, the people that I know, the small business community and my customers.
View the story “RARE Forum, The Drill Hall, London 3rd Nov 2011″ on Storify
We live in changing times. We live in times where the power of the consumer is rising and it is changing everything. We live in times where harnessing the power of relationships with our customers and our employees is becoming more and more key to our future growth and innovation.
Therefore, the onus on business leaders to learn, share ideas and network is rising as we think about how we grow our businesses.
There are many events in existence for businesses but these can be:
- Either for large or very small businesses;
- Organised by professional or trade associations and vendors of some sorts;
- Filled with talks/speakers that talk for around an hour that are ultimately trying to show you how smart they are or are trying to sell you something; and
- Don’t offer enough time for attendees to network, talk about and debate the issues that are presented.
Therefore, we thought it’d be great to develop and deliver an event for established small businesses, especially those with growing teams, across sectors.
In order to do this and to try and create a truly different event, we first started by describing the customer experience ie. what did we want the potential attendees to feel after they attended our event.
Here’s what we came up with:
Imagine this.
An event where you get to the end of the day and your attendance has solved a number of your most pressing problems, you have heard some great people speak, you have met a number of great contacts and your head is full of ideas for the future of your business. So much so, that when we hold the next one that you’ll want to bring a number of business contacts along it was so good.
Does that sound good?
Why did we do it this way? Well, rather than being lead by the features of our products or services, we started with the end in mind as we believe that is a better way to create something that will have an enduring emotional connection and value with our customers.
With that in mind we developed RARE Forum (www.rareforum.co.uk), an event that is:
- A place to share ideas, experiences and to discuss and debate the issues of the day;
- Not focused on selling anything (although there was be a price to attend);
- Filled with with a number of punchy 20min speaker slots (TED style) centred around a theme;
- Full of facilitated networking and debate;
- Where the whole day will be recorded (video) and made available via the website to the attendees for them to watch again at a later date or share with their team and contacts; and
- Where the output of discussions and answers to Qs posed by speakers will be collated and made available via a digital resource.
All this thinking and development was done earlier this year and I am pleased to say that on the 3rd November at The Drill Hall in Central London we held our first RARE Forum under the theme: ‘Business is Personal’. Talks over the course of the day covered subjects like:
- Business is personal and why it’s getting more so
- Unearthing killer customer insights
- The world is changing fast, how can we keep up and change with it
- How you can use your customers to help rally your troops?
- Creating a customer centric business
- What does being a leader mean in this new world?
- Generation Y and Z and the future of the talent pool
- What will our customers want in the future?
The day was a great success and was the first of many, we hope. We are now busy making plans for what happens next.
One of the things that we promised to do was to capture the ‘story of the day’ afterwards so that we could share that with the attendees as an aide-mémoire and as a way of capturing the essence of the day. You can check out the ‘story’ by following the link below. You really should take a look it as it includes all of the slides that the presenters used, pictures from the day, some sketches from our artist in residence and a whole set of tweets from our twitter hashtag: #rareforum. It’s also been done on Storify which means it looks pretty cool even if I do say so myself.
View the story “RARE Forum, The Drill Hall, London 3rd Nov 2011″ on Storify
For the team involved and myself personally it was a huge learning experience. Both exciting and scary in equal measure. What it did teach me, however, was that starting with the potential attendees, my customers, and what sort of experience and feeling I wanted to create for them helped give us a better understand of not what to do. But, more importantly, what not to do. Once we understood that we had a great platform to build from.
Another big lesson that I learnt is that if you want to make your business great, if you want to stand out from your competitors then you have to be willing to fail in public. However, done with the right intention and in the right way the actual risk of failure gets much, much smaller.
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Social Impact of Working From Home
A few days ago I was once again reminded by Joshua Levy and his piece “One Blogger Asks: Is the Grass Really Greener on the Web Worker’s Lawn?” on his blog Web Worker Daily that I wanted to write a piece about what I believe to be the social impact of home working.
Joshua is asking some interesting questions about working from home:
If I ask myself these and other questions I’m invariably drawn to find answers in my personal work life and how it has changed in the last decade.
In 1999 I was still office based, traveled from one of our offices around the world to the next and was rarely home. In fact most of the time those years I came home Friday very late or Saturday and then often left Sunday night again. So I saw little of my family and especially my son who is now grown-up and ready to go to university.
Then in 1999 I sold my ISP-business and went back to run WinWeb. This time around I worked from home, right from the start I did not want to be in an office and lead the same life as before. So for the past eight years I have been there when my son came home from school, I even picked him up often enough. I was here when he came home with the latest music CD, I had to listen to – not always easy, I admit – or the latest sport-shoes form addidas had finally arrived at the shops.
Similarly I spend much more time with my wife, going for lunch, doing some “essential” gardening – I hated gardening, but love it now. I could give you many more examples, but you get the picture.
While there are many challenges for home workers, I believe we are seeing the beginning of an “reversal” trend. I would like to list here some challenges I believe our society is facing currently:
There are many more examples. This whole process began with the “Industrial Revolution” some 150 years ago. Some of us may even remember a time when three or even four generations of a family lived in one house. People worked in their villages, child-care or care for family “just” happened – was that a bad or good thing? Looking at single parent families and the impact on our children, I would argue it was a good thing, and so would the many parents working from home exactly for that reason – to provide a healthy family environment for their loved ones.
I believe that the whole trend of home working may in the future allow us to have a much more natural work/life balance and will reverse some of the damaging effects of the post industrial revolution changes in our society. People will live closer to family, local communities will be revived – I believe that is happening as we speak, and our children will benefit from “more family”, and all this will have a profound impact on all our lives and the environment.
I would encourage Joshua and everyone else working from home to relearn the social skills of building local friendships, or live near family and give you the social life you need.
After all, this technology we at WinWeb and others supply makes it possible to work from anywhere, gives you a tremendous amount of freedom to live the life you want, where you want.
Let’s hope in hundred years from now people will see this era not only as the “Information Age”, but also the age when we learned to live a better work/life balance, in tune with our emotional and social needs as individuals, families and society as a whole. What do you think?
Have a great weekend with your family and friends.
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