By Leigh Jackson
From our guest speaker event with Cesar Gamio back in January 2021 to our last of the year with Rob May in December 2021, we have delivered 30+ fantastic special guest speakers to talk to our Members – Well done Ollie Austen on this amazing achievement. And thank you to all our guest speakers – you were amazing and hopefully you will return to talk to us again in the near future.
We have met some amazing Founders too. Here are but a few we are had the pleasure of working with in 2021
“We have delivered 30+ fantastic special guest speakers to talk to our Members”
We hosted our first f2f meeting after lockdown at the Ceme Conference Centre and it was great to finally get to meet some of our members in person.
We hosted a whopping 50 weekly Wednesday drop in surgery zoom calls with Our members !!! This enabled Our members to gain the perspective of other founders providing regular input on progress and decisions.
Our members are free to drop in via zoom and talk about their issues in a safe confidential space with like minded individuals where they can discuss their business with other successful business owners, try out new ideas, and get feedback before actually making decisions critical to them and their business.
We have just launched a special feature where Our members can demonstrate to the rest of the group in a short 10 minute session before the drop-in surgery which we video and share with the rest of the group to watch at their leisure.
We started our WhatsApp group for our members this August and it has been an amazing way for us to stay in touch on a daily basis sharing news and helping one another.
We have launched a Plug Your Business feature for our Members to start promoting our members & their businesses every Monday via LinkedIn. In the style of a short written interview piece they can introduce themselves and promote their businesses to our followers.
We have had a lot of interest so far and have many members signed up and in line waiting to be featured. If you are a member and would like to be featured in the new year please apply here.
In November we launched our collaborative Step up 2 pitch event in association with a few of our Members.
This was another face to face event that took place at Huckletree, Shoreditch and was kindly sponsored by Connectd.
This event was very successful, so much so that we will be making it a regular event – the next one scheduled to take place in Feb 2022, Apply here
Why we held this event.
For many founders, one of the scariest moments is having to come out into the open and start presenting your idea to people who might not love it as much as you. Pitching your idea is hard. The general rule of thumb is that it takes at least 20 hours of live sessions in front of real people to get it nailed. But what you don’t want to do is have a practice run in front of someone who might be important to your future.
We aimed to help as many founders as we could because we don’t want anyone inadvertently burning through their limited time or resources. We wanted to create a safe and supportive space where founders could get practice, learn from others and get access to honest and constructive feedback fast and effectively.
As you can see we have been very busy this year as have our Members who have been amazing and achieving wonderful things themselves. They truly are inspirational and have the spirit of a fantastic entrepreneurial community helping each other throughout.
We’d like to say a huge Thank You to all our Members, supporters and team, it’s been a pleasure to work with you all and we are looking forward to an exciting 2022.