A new way to Shhmooze at conferences

Ever been to a conference and wasted hours trying to find the person you wanted to talk to?  Or wanted to meet someone who shared your interest in a topic/challenge in a crowded room?

Enter Shhmooze.com still in beta which claims to help you “discover the strangers who are useful or interesting to you.”

It’s essentially a location-based iphone app (coming soon to Blackberry and Android) that allows you to check in at an event and broadcast your profile to those around you. In return, you can see other Shhmooze users near by and if there’s a good match up, arrange to meet.

It’s certainly an interesting solution to a common networking challenge.

Having just returned from the annual association meeting of Specialized Information Publishers in Washington DC with 450 people attending, trying to find someone in a crowd who you’ve never met and have no idea what they look like, it’s nigh on impossible.

I tried tweeting my interest in meeting other publishers to benchmark on e-learning, but my tweet flashed up on the Twitter wall and quickly got lost in the noise of a busy conference.

Had the conference organizers been using Shhmooze, then maybe, just maybe I could have flagged that interest and met an interested party just a little bit easier. Plus Shhmooze are launching some useful tools for organizers to publish your schedule, speaker profiles and twitter feeds to help take your conference to the next level.

I’ll be trialing Shhmooze at some upcoming events to see if it’s as good as they say it is. Let’s hope so.

Gumball Rally 3000: me and the ‘Hoff’

It’s official. After some 11^th hour negotiations, I have agreed to join David Hasselhoff and Christian Slater on the starting grid of this year’s Gumball 3000 Rally in a brand new banana yellow Ferrari 599 GTO.

Yes it’s all true. Someone pinch me quickly. For those of you who know me well, I am arguably the person least qualified to enter a celebrity rally for petrol-heads. I have the map-reading skills of a short-sighted stoat and a penchant for long stops in service stations complete with cup of coffee, donut and the paper.

Unlike the other listed Gumballers, I have never achieved fame in a minor sport (think table tennis, roller blading and skate boards), notoriety as a rapper, nor have I ever snogged Rosanna Arquette, or rubbed shoulders with Pamela Anderson or John Travolta. But perhaps all this is set to change.

In truth, I am a last minute call up. A garbled phone call from Bangkok requesting my urgent participation…liberal use of the phrases “Opportunity of a lifetime” and ‘Awesome’ plus some celebrity name-dropping did the trick. How could I say no?

This year’s rally starts from Covent Garden in London on May 26^th and finishes six days later in Istanbul, Turkey via Paris, Monte Carlo, Venice, Zagreb and Belgrade.

I am being parachuted in to Venice (though hopefully not literally) to take over co-pilot duties for the second half of the rally, which will likely include:

• asking for directions to the motorway in broken Croatian

• offering large sums of money to border police for the release of our car from the pound

• and frantic calls to the British consulate to bail my driver out of jail

But like the Janitor in ‘Hong Kong Fuey’ I am thinking of pimping myself to celebrity status, transforming myself from everyday small business entrepreneur Robin Crumby, in to a caped super hero (perhaps Bananaman to keep with the yellow theme?). Or perhaps a tall story about being on ‘Dragons’ Den’ (you remember Reggae Reggae sauce, yeah, I was the guy after him…etc) or I was the drummer for 80’s pop sensation and one-hit wonder Rick Astley.

Two weeks and counting to perfect my cover.

Suggestions and support welcome.

I’m going to need it.

Bypass the banks: peer to peer lending for small business

If the private sector, and small business in particular, is going to power the UK out of recession and take up the job market slack as the state gets smaller, then access to capital is likely to be critical. But where will this funding for small businesses come from?

Cash-strapped banks aren’t lending to small businesses, and those lucky few who do get loans are paying punitive interest rates. Meanwhile cash-rich individuals and businesses are getting derisory interest rates on their savings

Surely this is a massive opportunity for someone, somewhere, somehow to plug the funding gap and cut out the banks altogether?

The idea of peer to peer lending is by no means new. Zopa.com have been a notable winner in filling a hole left in availability of personal loans by high-street banks, but what about lending to small businesses?

Enter Funding Circle. Backed by venture capital firm Index Ventures, Funding Circle connect small businesses seeking loans with a pool of private individuals and other businesses with spare cash for rates well below those of the banks.

With average returns of 8.3% a year for investors, it’s easy to see why they’ve had £12m bid on loan requests since inception.

Funding Circle let you choose the businesses you want to lend to. They vet each business and assign them a risk category, so lenders can set their own level of risk. If a company gets into arrears, Funding Circle do all the chasing and debt recovery.

So, whilst your money is not protected by the FSA, as it would with a high street bank, Funding Circle limit the amount lent to any individual business to 5% of your capital.

So if the worst happens, and one of the businesses you have lent to goes bust, you lose a maximum of 5% your money. According to Guardian.co.uk,  Zopa’s default rate on loans is just 0.7%.

Index Ventures have a strong track record of investing in successful businesses such as LoveFilm, Playfish, Betfair and Skype.

So come on all you wealthy individuals and businesses with cash piles, put your money to good use and help small businesses power the UK back to growth.

Starting your own business: video interview with David Mellor

Thanks to Fiona Mulliner for sharing this great short video with author and visiting lecturer at Cass Business School, David Mellor,  who offers some useful advice to would-be entrepreneurs who want to go from employee to self-employed.

Car dealerships rant part two: Sayonara Autoquake

Sod’s law strikes again. (Is this the commentator’s curse you hear so much about…)

No sooner had I trumpeted online car superstore Autoquake as being a shining example of the future of used car buying in the UK, then it swiftly goes into administration.

As someone who paid for a warranty with them, I am doubly saddened.

A stark message on their home page reads:

Autoquake Limited (In Administration) (“the Company”)

If you are interested in purchasing any of the assets of the Company including the Company’s domain name and e-commerce platform, please contact MCR directly on 020 7487 7240.

Come on entrepreneurs, make them an offer. This is a great idea and hopefully a great investment.

Why car dealerships are in dire need of a shake up

I’ve undertaken a secret shopper style experiment.

In my hunt for a replacement car, I’ve trawled literally dozens of websites, stomped round showrooms, completed countless enquiry forms and sent several e-mails to dealers.

My conclusion is that car dealerships are in a league of their own.

Is there any other business on earth that think it’s ok to:

1.     Ignore customers when they come in to your store

2.     Not bother to return a call

3.     Not bother to follow up a sales enquiry by e-mail

I have built up a small treasure-trove of excuses and sales spiel, my favourite being: “Problem is the Q5 has been so popular that Audi have cut production to maintain resale values.”

In what weird, twisted parallel universe does this make any sense? I’m sure this complacency and arrogance is not confined to Audi alone, I suspect the dealerships for the other mid-market brands such as BMW, Volkswagen, Volvo, LandRover, and Lexus are just as bad. Perhaps this is all part of a grand green conspiracy to make us drive less. I don’t know.

 

And getting your car fixed is almost as bad. Going into a service centre is almost as surreal as a Fawlty Towers sketch, a curious mix of being made to feel unwelcome, and thoroughly ignorant about all things mechanical, all in the space of five minutes. A joy-less experience that never seems to cost less than £500 no matter what you went in for.

The internet has done a great job of challenging and disrupting complacent industries (music, film, real estate etc) and yet car dealerships have been left largely untouched.

Until now that is. One chink of light then is a company like Autoquake. Not only do they let buy a car without ever visiting a showroom, they also deliver it to you with a 7-day money-back guarantee and save you money in the process. Sounds like a winning combination to me.

And having seen how it works first-hand, it has so far been a problem-free buying experience, so once their stock of cars increases and the competition wake up to the opportunity, their online share of the used car market should deservedly rise. Likewise, mobile tyre fitters like etyres.co.uk or blackcircles.com who come to you and save you money. Now if we could just find an internet-based solution to servicing cars, we would never have to go near a showroom or service centre ever again!

Surely there’s an entrepreneur out there who can take up the gauntlet.

The flat mirror: why is it so difficult to give honest feedback?

Why is it so difficult to give honest feedback?

We all want an easy life, right? Who wants to be the nay-sayer, the person who rocks the boat, the troublemaker who tells it how it is? But often this honesty is exactly what the person asking for feedback is looking for.

Take creative writing. Drawing inspiration from my creative writing course, and after some furious pencil-chewing and rewrites, I was finally ready to show a trusted soul my first short story. Fearing the worst, I retreated to the safe habour afforded by reading it to my eight year old son. Expecting at best disinterest, I was pleasantly surprised when he told me it was the best story he’d ever heard.

Emboldened by such unbridled praise and following a fourth rewrite, I took the next step of showing it to other family members in search of some more hard-hitting criticism. However, their words of encouragement now convinced me that I was asking the impossible. Like ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, does anyone really want to be first to tell you that your talent-less scribbles exhibit no more writing skill than a dyslexic stoat?

And so it is in the world of business.

Last week, I beat a hasty retreat from a free two-day ‘Introduction to Coaching’ course, lasting only till the first lunch-break, because I belatedly realized that coaching is mostly about ‘asking good questions’ and avoiding at all costs giving advice or feedback. Clearly, it takes someone of slightly more saintly composure than me to bite their tongue and avoid telling the person being coached to stop whinging and ‘just get on with it.’

However, I have been mightily impressed by the power of the so-called ‘flat mirror experience’ afforded by a peer group with no vested interests in your affairs. The idea being that a flat mirror reflects the real you, with no distortions, or at least ‘the real you’ as others see you, warts and all.

As the Better Business Programme Director Gerard Burke warned those about to be coached by their peers, this can be a useful but, at times, uncomfortable experience for the owner manager.

Having your hopes and dreams critiqued and your plans for global domination written off as unrealistic and poorly conceived, can be bitter medicine indeed. However, putting egos aside, it can also be a most rewarding exercise when properly structured and supported, prompting you to reevaluate, reassess and look again with fresh eyes.

It is widely accepted that the emotional complexity of running a small business can at times be intense, built on an intricate web of personal relationships (doubly so for a family business such as mine). Once emotion is removed from the process of giving feedback, the insights achieved can be enlightening.

Building a peer group network and a panel of external advisors you can rely on for honest opinions can really help you remove those ‘rose-tinted glasses’, and even re-channel and realign collective energies behind shared goals.

From talking to other entrepreneurs, I now know that tough criticism is like oxygen, it fuels the fire. In my case, the more I’m told that something won’t work, the greater my urge to prove someone wrong.

So, banish the ‘yes’ men and get yourself a flat mirror. And start seeing your world with new eyes.