Worth the early start. . .

Last Saturday morning, 4.15 a.m. – still dark – and my alarm woke me so I could get to a marketing-focused business club meeting on time.

Was it worth the effort?

Yes!

The London event, hosted by SuccessTrack, was a gathering of enthusiastic and ambitious business owners (my kind of people ) listening to four powerful speakers.

First up was Mark Perle from ‘The Guru Garage’ - I love that name! - sharing some great insights to the real power of business networking – when it’s done properly. He gave tips from how to prepare before the meeting - so you can SHINE (his acronym for how to create a brilliant first impression) - to the skills a good networker uses to be extremely effective.

He got the audience actively involved; getting us to use one of two structures to create a powerful introduction to share with each other (very similar to the method I talk about in my posts Do people remember you? and Your Wow! introduction ).

Here’s one of the templates he gave us:

“What I am is [an accountant] …………………………
But actually what I do is help my clients to [improve their financial control]……
and as a result they [reduce costs and increase profits]……………….…….”

I also got another nice little tip on how to help people remember your name after an introduction. One that I and my fellow delegates put into action straight away!

You also can read The Ten Biggest Mistakes of Business Networkers on Mark’s blog: Perl’s Wisdoms.

Next up was Emma Wimhurst from EMpwr. She is an absolute inspiration.

Her presentation was The Devil’s In The Detail in which she distilled her experience of taking her original start-up business (Diva Cosmetics) from zero to £1million turnover in her first 12 months. She gave us the 7 business disciplines (you can see them on her website at www.empwr.co.uk) she used to continue her business growth to £2.8 million before selling the company.

Emma explained how her 50-word company goal statement kept her focused on the right success track for her business when tempting ideas and offers came up. That struck a chord ‘cause it is so easy to get caught up with other ideas for your business that can dilute your effectiveness.

Emma’s vivacity, passion and downright business common sense made a great impression on me – especially when she revealed that she did all this whilst starting a family!

Emma has kindly agreed to be a guest blogger and share some of her business building experiences and insights with you at a future date.

After lunch Andrew Ludlam (Maverick Marketing Consultancy) was our next speaker. If you’ve been following this blog for a while you may remember Andrew wrote a guest post: How do we get bums on seats back in September.

Andrew packed an amazing amount of marketing-how-to content into his presentation, including examples of what he’d done successfully with his clients. As you can imagine, there was a lot of note-taking throughout the audience.

His marketing approach matches closely with mine so a large number of the tips he shared were known to me. But I also heard a few little gems that were eye-openers too… it’s always good to see another marketing professional’s view on the wisdom you both have .

You can get Andrew’s take on The 7 Critical Marketing Mistakes Nearly Every Business Owner Makes in his free report.

The final speaker was Paul Shipley from Remarkable Practice. Paul works specifically with accountants helping them to be ‘remarkable’ for their clients.

He gave us a Business One Page Planner, based on the book The Balanced Scorecard by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, which meshed really well with the business building and marketing advice we’d heard from Emma and Andrew.

Paul encouraged us to use it to ‘BOPP’ to the beat of a growing business and I’ve already started to do that.

Add to all this the interesting people I talked to in the breaks – one of whom has agreed to share how he uses marketing techniques, similar to some of the tips you’ve read on this blog, to great effect in his hairdressing business – and I think you’d agree the early start was worthwhile.

I’m looking forward to next month’s SuccessTrack business club event.

~ Carol Bentley