Last week I attended a great conference in London. Great for two main themes.
Marketing
First, the conference was organised by Chris Cardell who is the UK’s, and some say the worlds, leading marketing Guru – check out his marketing tips web site if you have any reason at all to increase your exposure or make money.
Some years ago I was personally anti profit and even anti being wealthy – better to earn a decent wage and provide a good service. But, gradually I have realised that if you don’t aim to make good money then you won’t. If you do make money then you become much freer to help others and get done what needs to be done. And i think it was wonderful that to me, Chris seemed to emphasise the underlying positive reasons for making money much more this time round.
I was at the Cardell conference with Dave Blakeman who runs RPS RoofWright, the software company I work for. In the last two years since I first went to Chris Cardell’s conference and especially since Dave went last year we have come a long way as a business.
One of the many ways in which you can benefit your business, according to Chris, is to be associated with celebrities so here goes:
Dave and I with Bob Geldof at the Chris Cardell Conference, copyright Cardell Media
Cardell, along with a great business consultant, Mike Knudsen, who really gets business results, have been two major influences in our improving business performance in the last two years.
Before I go onto my other theme, i want to share a couple of thing from the conference because the line up really was impressive. (You can see the full line up from the conference at Chris Cardell’s site and if you are wondering what you missed out on then you can even get DVD’s of the conference if you are quick.) The highlights of the whole show for me were, and i am not even going to go into the real wealth of marketing material here:
- Karen Brady – who formerly turned Birmingham City football club – an inspiring story of how despite being the youngest Chief Exec of a football club and the first woman to take on the job changed an old fashioned loss making organisation into a company worth tens of millions.
- Gerald Ratner – the man who did a really crap speech many years ago gave a thoroughly entertaining and inspiring speech. Apparently at one point he owed a billion pounds to the banks and, as he said, that was rather a lot of money back then.
- Sir Bob Geldof. I knew the name, who doesn’t if you are over a certain age? I saw that famous concert on the tele way back and i sort of know that he was the driving force behind it. But wow, you should hear Bob Geldof do a speech. He spoke for well over an hour and gave what I thought was a quite incredible story. I really didn’t know the full story or the passion behind it. For more on Bob Geldof KBE and his work see the charity section of his web site.
Personal
It’s funny but sometimes life seems to bring things to you. Often there is an odd coincidence that seems like maybe it might mean something. Some people say being in the flow is all about tuning in to these signals – others would call it being in touch with your intuition. One of the centrals themes of the international best seller, The Celestine Prophecy, is coincidences and how following these pointers in our lives is the beginning of a greater path.
Just occasionally, the coincidences gather into one small space time bubble and hit you in a way that is very hard to ignore. Some people say that the world is going to see a lot more of this in the coming years what with 2012 looming large. I don’t know about that but for me one of these times happened last weekend at the Cardell conference.
It was almost as if it were planned from the moment i got there. Of those 800 people in the audience three people i spent significant time talking to were working in various forms of personal development. And, on my return someone else has also suggested that it may be time for some personal work.
So the result, it seems, is that I have some work to do. The first step is in place – i have a new life plan! Let’s see where it goes from here…
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