M & A Rainmaker

Which Business Networking Meeting is the best in Birmingham at the moment ??

I take a trip to the Grosvenor Casino on Rebecca Hyslop’s recommendation to try out this networking event and find it very interesting and professional

I have not been to a networking meeting for some time ( I think the last one was in Burton on Trent a couple of months ago ) and certainly the Business Biscotti meeting at the Grosvenor Casino on Broad Street in Birmingham was the first networking meeting that I have been to in Birmingham for a year or more.

I was introduced to Biscotti by Rebecca Hyslop of Push Media Marketing who runs a number of networking meetings in Birmingham.

I very rarely go to Casino’s so that was also a novelty to me( I think the last one was in Biarritz ).

I hoped that the meeting was going to be more fun than formal – obviously productive aswell – and knowing Rebecca I was pretty sure that it would be.

Online research prior to arriving at the Biscotti meeting indicated that although there was a website, social media activity appeared limited. The Biscotti name piqued my curiousity but I have only just found out that the name is based on the first meeting where Biscotti biscuits were made and served.

I parked in The Nautical Club just down the road and walked around to Broad Street and the entrance of the Grosvenor Casino.

The receptionist was absolutely lovely and I proffered photo id in order to get a Casino card. The receptionist phoned down for the Manager, Paul Bradford, to meet me.

I met him at the bottom of the stairs leading onto the Casino floor and he led me to the group that was assembled, chatting at the bar area.

With Rebecca, the receptionist and Paul I had definitely had a very professional and positive introduction to this networking meeting.

The first person that Paul, very kindly, introduced me to had actually seen me speaking at an event in Marco Pierre White’s recently – so that was a great start.That was Glenn Richardson of Photo Booth Hire.

A chat with someone else and then an introduction to someone who turned out to be with Mattioli Woods – where I am a client !!!! Bit of a surprise and an opportunity to praise them a bit – my account manager there has been brilliant actually.

I loved meeting next with Raphael from HNS Signs – a company that I had come across on twitter during #lichfieldlocal hour run by Sarah Morley. Raphael gave me his bosses card, Michelle Henry, and a lovely booklet promoting their work.

As I get into this post I am thinking about who I met, and what made them memorable and what contact information I came away with. Later on I will say who contacted me and how.

My primary interest is what people are doing online. Their ” Internet Presence ” as I call it. ( A combination of web/blogsite and social media accounts ).

I then met Personal Trainer John Wang ( 07795437716 ) who it turned out had seen me at a Market United Kingdom presentation. Someone at John’s gym was an Unfranchise Owner. ( Actually franchises were much in evidence in this meeting ).

Whilst sipping a glass of water Mike Bowden walked over to chat. ( I am grateful to Rebecca Hyslop for doing a tweet after the meeting that contained Mike’s contact details as well as other peoples ). As well as being a Life Coach Mike was a martial arts practitioner and I go to a Kick Boxing class at Burton Kick Boxing Academy with Chris Squirrel so we had something in common there.

On coming to chat to Rebecca ( and the lady from Best of Birmingham who kindly looked after my laptop bag and coat and another lady from Grosvenor Casino’s ) I got into a conversation with Tom West from Central Telecomms. and Richard Murphy from Bank House Corporate. My background is in Telecomms and M & A so this was an interesting conversation.

I decided to leave after that as it was Remembrance Day and I wanted to spend some time at The Nautical Club and The National Memorial Arboretum.

I should point out that I was given 6 business cards but I didn’t give out any as is my approach of late.

Tom West from Central Telecomms. was the first person to contact me ( by twitter and Linkedin ) and he didn’t have any of my details so I was most impressed with this response. Later on he sent me information on the company. Stellar responsiveness !!!!

Rebecca did a tweet after the event that included ( probably ) every person that had a twitter account that she knew who was at the meeting. This was very useful.

After connecting with people there I had a few conversations.

I also established email communications with Michelle and Raphael at HNS Signs – they just look so well sorted as a company.

All in all this was a great event with some great people at it and I would recommend to anyone ( as I am doing here ).

Services

Services

or contact:

http://www.linkedin.com/in/leighhopwood

When I started LanSwitch ( which became Voyager ) in the early 90’s I set aside a bedroom for an office and on my desk I had a telephone, a fax machine and a laptop ( initially not connected to the Internet , later connected with a dial-up connection ) with Office and a Contact Manager application and a printer. Luxury, I thought because it was the same as I had at Fibernet and much better than I had at Memorex.

My target market was basically: Companies that had busy Local Area Networks; that were in either The Midlands ( where I lived ) or London ( where I could easily commute to and knew people ). So, I basically targeted a combination of London based Financials and other general companies in London and the Midlands. I think I bought the Computer Users Yearbook as my basic database. ( Actually a very comprehensive and detailed source of information ).

I went through the process of identifying a target market and building a database of prospects and suspects many times over during my sales and business start-up career.

Typically now I will segment by horizontal ( size of company ), vertical ( type of company ) and geographical ( location ) and then various other factors eg structure of company, people within that company eg IT Managers etc etc.

Then a database can be purchased which is targeted and therefore typically lower cost than purchasing 1000’s of contacts many of which are not within your target market.

There are many database suppliers these days so it is possible to get some great offers on targeted data.

The equipment side has obviously come on in 17 years but not incredibly so – broadband and wi-fi; scanning software and fax software; CRM versus Contact Management; softphones ( eg Skype ) and video conferencing ( Skype, Webex etc ); standalone traditional and IP phones;printers. 

Where there has been enormous progress has been in Internet search and Social Network Marketing.

If you know what vertical you want to concentrate on eg Lawyers in Staffordshire you will find much of the information that you need online via Google or some other search engine.

With great timing ( !! ) I have just been reading this article about Linkedin

 http://money.cnn.com/2010/03/24/technology/linkedin_social_networking.fortune/

that I picked up on Twitter ( posted by Jon Besag who is in sales at Linkedin 😉

This is well worth a read for many reasons. 

This article includes comments about in house and external recruiters using Linkedin to find the people that they/thier clients are looking for . There certainly are a lot of recruiters on Linkedin – in fact when I was talking to a friend of mine the other day who is a Linkedin trainer he told me that there were about 68,000 people on Linkedin who called themselves recruiters ( I just did a Linkedin search for ” Recruiters ” and got about 48,000 ) and that there were probably about 100,000 because a lot of recruiters did not call themselves recruiters.

I used this fact recently to help a company that I am working with, who are selling multi job board posting software, to target recruiters. From a small, personalised ” mailshot ” to selected Linkedin recruiters we got a few very positive responses and made a proposal to one within a week and got an order from it.

Recruitment is an obvious thing to do on Linkedin but  as said in the article ” The obvious one is jobs, but it’s not just jobs. It’s also clients and services.”

For me the goal is to make a ” personalised ” approach to potential clients and ” personalisation ” requires research. The difference between what you can do now and what you could do 17 years ago is that you can gather far more information on people and companies before you make any approach whatsoever.

If you combine a targeted database with internet and social media search then you have a fantastic tool to help you personalise your ” intelligent ” marketing and sales approach.

If you are a member of eg Ecademy, Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter, Friendfeed,Skype or MSN then each of these have thier own search facilities – some more sophisticated than others.

Just today I was asking someone how they prospected on the Internet and they said Linkedin, Skype and MSN.

Using a combination of Internet search and Social/Business networks you can find out an awful lot about people and companies.

Dorsets Global Production company IPP Joules defies the snow with an Asterisk based Phone System from Poundbury Systems and Microsoft Small Business Server

That was the news from Poundbury Systems this week. With most of Dorset (and the UK) hit by snow and ice, what was the impact on local businesses?

Poundbury Systems have long understood the benefits of flexible working solutions for their customers and this week the foresight in this approach showed its true value.

‘Many of our customers had issues in getting some or all of their staff to their offices. The solution was simple. The Microsoft Small Business Server based remote working facilities that we had set up allowed staff to use their home PC’s to have quick, easy and secure access to their work files. No time was wasted and no business was lost. The picture was completed by diverting the Asterisk based phones to home and mobile numbers, something that is quick and easy to do.’ commented Clare Jenkins, Director at PSL.

Bob Cottell of ipp agreed “At ipp, much of our work is time critical and, as we deal with our clients around the world, guess what – they don’t care what the weather is like in the UK and they expect us to have contingency plans in place. During the current weather, we are able to work equally well from home as we can in the office, thanks to PSL putting ‘remote access’ in place. We can access information and documents on our servers as normal, maintain email contact with clients and use ‘instant messenging’ as an effective way to maintain internal communication.

PSL has given us the flexibility to allow staff to work from home, delay coming into the office until the roads are less icy or even leave early to avoid congested roads. We are able to spend less time worrying about the weather and road conditions and more time maintaining service levels for your clients, during these chilly times.

Many thanks to PSL”

With more snow predicted, if you would like any advice on how you can minimise business disruption, contact Clare and her team on 01305 259849 or enquiries@poundbury.com.

For Global Production and Distribution Solutions contact IPP Joules at http://www.ippjoules.com/

It would perhaps take me too long to explain the whole story of how this book came about but it is a beautiful little book with some wise words in it written in a fun way. Perhaps one day I will tell the whole story !!

It’s author, Jet Rotmans, is an artist who, to me, has become an Internet artist. She may be one of the first artist’s to have embraced social networking and blogging and to have weaved art into the ether.

You can get a copy of the book here

http://www.floppyfaithfactory.com/

and you can find out more about Jet by Googling her and connecting with her.