This week the Nottingham Post held the first ever Business Summit, with top speakers brought in to share some amazing insights and business lessons. Two of my personal favourites were there and I’d love to share them with you.
First up was David Smith, who (if you’re not an economics geek like me), is a leading economist, author of many books, and the economics editor of the Sunday Times.
David gave us a pretty positive round up of the economy, in particular the East Midlands economy. These were his key points:
- That growth IS sustainable – hurrah! The Bank of England has an annual growth forecast of 3% from now until 2017. Good news for business planning.
- Interest rate rises will start about this time next year, and rate increases will be gradual, with forecasts of no higher than 2.5% to 3%. He predicts that bank margins will fall from their current levels so the impact of the rate rises won’t be felt quite so much.
- That lending to SME’s has been very weak and this needs to be fixed.
- The 3 critical elements to a successful economy are Investment, Infrastructure and Innovation. David expressed a concern about where the East Midlands investment is coming from, and that we need to sell ourselves better.
- If you fancy some political speculation he predicts that we’ll have another Con / Libdem coalition next year, and that Scottish independence referendum will result in a NO vote.
- And the most important economic indicator of all? The SKIP index! Just try counting how many skips you see in the streets if you want to see evidence of the recovery!
Then we had the fantastic Josephine Fairley, the co-founder of Green & Blacks chocolate. She and her husband started the company with just £20k in 1991 and have grown it to be a £100m company. Impressive. She told us that the keys to their success, apart from the very long hours, total focus and commitment of course, were their obsession with PR, marketing and ethics. They were never once tempted away from their organic and fair trade principles.
They found that entering awards and giving away lots and lots of chocolate helped enormously, and she advocates if you have that kind of business to give away your product to anyone who might write about you or support you.
I love a good business tip, and she gave us one I’d not heard before. She told us about the 2 essential business tools – the Microscope and the Telescope. Use the microscope to get the detail right and the telescope to stand back on a regular basis and look at your business from afar; what can you do differently.
No talk for me would be complete without finance. In the growth years of Green & Black, Josephine told us that managing cashflow was their biggest nightmare, one they fixed by using invoice discounting, before bringing in venture capital investment.
Her top advice here was to make sure you get the fit right with any investor; they have to share your principles and ethics. And if you’re a control freak like her, you’ll have to get your head round the fact that you can have the cash, or you can have control, but you can’t have both.
And her final killer punchline? Your work has to be about your passion, not just your pension. What great advice.
If you didn’t go to the Summit this year then I seriously recommend you look out for next year’s event. Definitely a stand out day; one guaranteed to put a spring back in your business step.