ex-Dragon Theo and owner of Rymans and Robert Dyas et al set up a scheme on Twitter called Small Business Sunday. If you are a small Business, then on Sunday 5-7pm you can Tweet him using the hashtag #SBS with a reason as to why you should win an Award. Each Sunday he picks 6 winners, tweets them and his elves then add the winners' details to a dedicated website. You can only try once a week, but can try as often as you like. Took us 4 or 5 tweets, changing the working each time, which seems to be below average (some took 6 months to win)
https://theopaphitissbs.com/
It's a small way of getting small businesses together and supporting each other.
Not only that, he and his team host an annual get together at the ICC, Birmingham. This is a conference and Networking event. All winners are invited (2,500 to date) and a large number of them (700 this year) attended. The event is free (heavy duty sponsors pick up the tab - Rymans, Roberrt Dyas, DHL, Western Union and a couple of others), there is a free buffet lunch and an end of day goody bag. The event was today and it included:
Introduction from Theo
Talk from Raja Saggi, Google UK's Head of SME Marketing
Fireside chat between Theo and Sir Tom Hunter (Set up and subsequently sold Foot locker / Sports Locker for £280M and now runs a philanthropy business)
1:1 meetings with staff from the sponsors
Other presentations.
Meeting points organised by sector so that you could just rock up and chat to who was there. Speed dating if you like.
We won back in September and first timers get a certificate and photo with Theo. It was a very good event and Sir Tom was very engaging as Theo steered him through his life.
+ves: We've gained a good number of followers on Twitter (forcing me to up my game and frequency of Tweets). Nice signed "SBS Winner" Certificate and PR shot (to follow).
-ves: For our sector (First Aid Training) the Networking didn't really generate anything new and we weren't looking for anything specific although we did meet up (1 arranged, 1 coincidence) with people we knew. Groups of people were Networking away, so it was probably just me.
Anyone else there today? I'm one of the two Smurfs.
