Networking my way through the NHS LDNTech Talk

Last week, we had our first of many LDNTech Talks. The topic more specifically: navigating the NHS landscape and developing key relationships. Being a student from America on a study abroad program, I had all kinds of feelings and nerves rushing through my body beforehand. Do I know enough about the NHS? How do I start a good conversation with someone I don’t know? Do I do this? Do I do that?

Long story short, the night was a huge success. We had three inspiring and knowledgeable event panelists who were able to share their journey with the rest of us; Michael Seres, Mike Buck and Sarah Haywood. We were fortunate enough to have Sarah and Mike with us in person, while Michael was video chatted into the conversation. It’s amazing how far technology has taken us in this day and age. Thank you, Skype!

Here’s a bit of insight on how our three speakers got involved with the NHS. After a struggle with Crohns’s Disease, Michael created sensor technology for ostomy patients. He is now trying to get it into the UK health system. Mike oversees BJSS engagements on behalf of the central government of the NHS. He is experienced in all kinds of IT functions and development. Last, but certainly not least, Sarah Haywood. Sarah is chief operating officer of MedCity who had an endless amount of experience and brought with her helpful insight to all guests. I can speak for everyone when I say the three panelists did an incredible job!

After hearing a few inspiring stories and a good question and answer period, it was time to network. I managed to talk with a few very interesting people and get an insight on the system as a whole, as well as personal thoughts and opinions. One thing I picked up on quite quickly – The key to success is creating and developing successful business relationships. It’s all about networking!

In regards to my previously asked questions, I’ve answered them for myself. Just go with the flow. Networking isn’t about going into an event or conversation with every word of every sentence planned out. Rather, it’s about jumping into a conversation with an open mind, letting things flow naturally.

“In today’s world, you have to interact. You can’t be some difficult, shy person who is not able to look someone in the face; you have to present yourself. You have to know how to talk about your vision, your focus, and what you believe in.” Anna Wintour

We hope to see you all at our next LDNTech Talk!

Tori Langhams

@Tlanghans

Gathering support from your tribe

How many pitches have you done for your business this week? You are at the next stage of the business and you need to find funding to take it to the next stage. You can’t scale without it. What type of funding is right for your business, angel, seed, crowdfunding, the series alphabet?

You should meet Michael Wilkinson, he is an investment manager that you want to meet. He is a lovely chap with a passion to help people reach their goals when the traditional banks are not able to help them and for companies that want to engage with their tribe. He is part of the team at the crowdfunding platform Crowdcube. He is well versed in the investment eco-system and can guide you to determine what type of funding is right for your business.

Check him out on youtube where he is striving with IngeniusJames to help small businesses access high-quality and relevant information.

Crowdcube empowers entrepreneurs to bypass traditional business angel networks, venture capital firms and banks to secure funding by connecting directly with the public.  Since its launch in 2011 it has successfully secured over £42 million pounds of investment in UK businesses and has over 100,000 registered members. According to Management Today, Crowdcube came of age in 2014

I cannot speak highly enough of Michael, he is a talented young man that would make you feel envious if he wasn’t such a lovely person. He has obviously spent a lot of time learning his trade and finding out where he can best advise his clients. He spends a lot of time with people in the early stages of their business helping them make the right decisions and connecting them to people who can help them. You can see why he fits in with us!

Stuart Lucas, Asset Match Ltd, is one who has experienced first-hand Michael’s drive to help others succeed. “Michael has been our main interface during our Crowdcube fund-raise. At all times he has been; knowledgeable, helpful, polite, responsive, and not afraid to suggest ideas and concepts that might benefit our efforts. We thank him and would recommend his services to other users and wish him well for the future…”

Michael is the first to admit that crowdfunding may not be for everyone, but, with the flexibility of the platform and technology changing all the time, he is at the forefront of making it more widely suitable for as many businesses as possible.

When looking for investment, it is not all about the money. You need to have a good relationship with the person who is happy to invest in your business, who agrees with your passion as well as bringing pragmatism, experience and knowledge. Michael has this in spades and as a conduit between your funders and you, he can help you aim higher.

He is often found passing his knowledge on when he can, he has been at Happy Hour, Social Media Week and in March will be at The Landing, with a Q&A session. If you want to understand funding, you want to get yourself down there and ask some questions.

Michael is such a lovely chap, based down in the West Country he comes to London when he needs to and is proof that you don’t have to be in London all week to be part of the disruption!

Ghilaine

@LadyGhilaine

Making a difference

With all the bad news that we get fed every day: disaster; terrorism; austerity; war, it can be hard to feel optimistic for the future. In our lives, we don’t see all this disaster, but we can still struggle to see how we can make an impact on any of it. Mark Wakefield can make you feel differently. Every time I sit and have a conversation with him I come away refreshed and feel that I can make a difference when the tide is going the other way.

Mark is a genuine and open gentleman whose enthusiasm for getting the best from people is infectious. With his extensive experience across a variety of industries, he is working to see how people can reinvigorate their sense of purpose and use it for good in their community, society or organisation.

Most people don’t wake up in the morning thinking that they will be bad today, but often the systems that are put in place can make it hard for people to do the right thing. Instead of constantly fighting, they succumb and go with the flow. This often makes people feel that they are not accountable for their actions.

This led Mark to answer the nagging question of why is it that that so many great ideas fail to work in practice? Too often, in his experience, the answer lies in the human and emotional dynamics of organisations which, when harnessed, have great transforming power but which, when ignored, frustrate even the best laid plans. He believes the long-term health of organisations will increasingly depend on showing how they create value for society as a whole.

He unleashes the energy that comes from a shared sense of purpose, which is does successfully in partnership with Martin Vogel, with their Counter-Consultancy, VogelWakefield. They don’t bring pre-defined organisational or leadership training and hope to fit the company they work with into it. They look at the company/team and work with them to build an impactful and natural culture. Every team is different and VogelWakefield fully appreciate that each needs a tailored approach

Liliane Landor, BBC, has this to say “This is about real attempts to find solutions to genuinely complex and tangled issues. And so they listen carefully, unpick and unravel knots and difficulties, restate and summarise, ask questions and ask again, then reflect back. They’re demanding and relish a challenge – they work with you rather than for you, they engage, collaborate and ensure clarity and precision prevail. And crucially they’re perfectly comfortable navigating different and seemingly contradictory worlds.”

All this experience gained in his professional life is used to help young people who are disadvantaged, but should not have to miss out on high aspirations. He works for the mentoring charity ReachOut who work with children in disadvantaged communities to raise aspirations and help them grow in character and competence. They improve self-confidence and develop numeracy, literacy, communication and memory skills whilst reinforcing our core values of fairness, self-control, good judgement and staying power. They do this through one-to-one mentoring with positive role models and team activities to promote leadership, trust and responsibility.

Here at Tech Talkfest he resonates with us with his sense of purpose and the gift of generosity that he lives daily. In researching for this piece, I found out that Mark is also an ordained Anglican priest. So which came first? His beliefs that made him the lovely chap that he is or does his personality fit with the ethos of being a priest? You could find out by ‘bumping’ into him in church on Sunday and you can read more about why he decided to here.

Hope you are having a great beginning to 2015

Ghilaine

@LadyGhilaine

How do you know you are in the right place?

You have turned up and found a group of people that you think are like you. How do you know you have met those of like mind? This is a question I often struggle with.

It can sound more difficult that actually is. People are often suspicious of ulterior motives that they project onto me. What does she want back if she is offering help? Is she slightly crazy? So what do you look for when finding your community.

1. I often think the first step is how they greet you.
Does it feel comfortable. Does it mirror how you greet those you already know and admire. If you have just entered the room, does everyone have a look on their face that mirrors how you feel? For me that is a smile. But for someone like my brother it will be a scrutinising look.

2. If you are not sure, just sit and watch, this is the best way to get a feel for the people around you. 
When it comes to connections, the best way is to go back to the basics and exercise your instinct.  More often than not, the human animal is very good at reading body language and voice intonation. You can get a feel for open or closed conversations.

3. As always it pays to listen.
If you are meeting 1:1, this is an important rule. Finding out about someone is the first way to identify if you have anything in common. To ensure the conversation flows it is important to find the commonality, but if you want to know if these are people you want to see again and again, the commonality needs to be something you want to enjoy not for example, that you both found off milk in the fridge this morning.

4. Finally, be yourself!
If you want to find the group that is right for you, there is no point trying to fit in, you need to be you and identify that they fit with you and you fit with them.

Go on, go outside and see if you can find your community! In January, we hope that we can help you. We will start our new program of Tech Talkfest events, watch out for the subjects that interest you most!

Ghilaine

@LadyGhilaine

“There is no London Food Startup Community” – or is there?

After three years of running a food festival in Scotland, I arrived in London in July and my first curiosity led me to ask, where I could find the food startup community down here. Well, I was a bit surprised, because I spent a good time looking and not much time finding.

There are a few small groups that occasionally flock together because they are jointly part of food startup incubator Kitchenette or foodies in the Escape Tribe, or perhaps in the London Food Startups Collective on Facebook. In general though, there sadly seems to be very little sharing of best practice or helping each other out and supporting, as you would find in other industries, especially in Tech. Instead, every great supplier and mentor remains a well-guarded secret for fear by the ketchup startup that the marshmallow startup might steal the customers. Wow.

This revelation led me to wonder:
Don’t these food startups all want to make it big? Surely
entrepreneurs can achieve more together than by themselves!

I took a few solid weeks to speak to well over 100 food entrepreneurs in London to find out what kind of event would really benefit them and their startups. It turned out they all faced similar challenges that were holding them back from taking their food startup to the next level: Creating a strong brand, design or packaging, scaling up production in line with demand, and social media and digital marketing – and knowing the right people who could connect or help them with experts to tackle these challenges. I knew I was onto something.

Throughout the past weeks and months I’ve tapped into and expanded on my network of industry experts and food & food tech startup founders, food bloggers, food startup enthusiasts and investors. I teamed up with another startup, Monkfeet, and we’ve created the Food StartUp School – a conference-like with line up of speakers and workshops we’re very excited to share with the London food and food tech entrepreneurs and enthusiasts. To name a few, we have CEO’s, Founders and MD’s of Jimmy’s Iced Coffee, The Grocery Accelerator, Packed Branding, Eat First, Just Eat and EatMyWorld. It’s a real mix of food and food tech, which is one-of-a-kind as far as London’s conferences and workshops go.

The Food Startup School is obviously not just about the speakers or workshops. Most importantly, it’s about the networking we’re facilitating and thereby building that food startup community and making it powerful. With two networking pitch sessions and three generous time slots for extensive networking, entrepreneurs will be able to make the most of an event packed with industry experts, investors, bloggers, journalists, many fellow entrepreneurs and those curious in food startups and thinking about starting their own.

Want to be part of the community? Check out the Food StartUp School – coming up on Dec 8th in Shoreditch.

Victoria Albrecht

Food StartUp School LDN

We are all portraits of our Community

I had the chance to go to the Portrait Gallery yesterday to see the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize exhibition. As any good piece of art would do, it generated deep thoughts and a huge appreciation for those photographers that, through their work and effort, allow us (the viewers) to be inspired through their experiences.

Every time I saw a portrait that really caught my attention, I would read about it with more egger, sometimes wishing more could be said about that piece… I wanted to know why the photographer chose that person, the level of connection between them and details about the photo shoot.
The exhibition displayed the work of different photographers around the world, what made it even more interesting was to see the different approaches they had in each one of the portraits.

While I was there, it came to my mind that we are talking about community this week at Tech Talkfest, and how important it is to be part of a community and even better, to choose to be part of one.

Each one of us carries parts of our backgrounds, deceptions, victories, etc. If someone were to make a portrait of you, how would it be? What would it look like? What would be the main point of attention? Probably if we had to choose, we would position ourselves on our best angle, wear the best outfit. Maybe some of us would rather like to be snapped on a normal day, just as you are right now.

This is the power of networking, that none of us have control of how people capture us, if they’d be intrigued and feel inspired or if they would find a “sidekick” to us. So the good advice is when you and I meet new people – just chill and be you! Everyday we have the same chances to be inspired by people. Why does it have to be in an art gallery or at a music concert? Why can’t it be around a table in a coffee bar having a chat?

Another thing that came out from yesterday’s visit to the Portrait Gallery was that we all involuntarily portrait our own communities. Nearly every portrait I saw drove my thoughts to one of my friends, some situation I’ve been in or a place I’ve visited. Even the least sociable person finds their connections somewhere and has someone to share their ideas with, (even if it’s with a cuddly penguin as we see on the latest John Lewis Christmas advert!).

We are all sociable people and isn’t it great that at Tech Talkfest we can be surrounded by great people with an immense capacity of doing good to us?

Analice Mina Collyer

@analicemina