Archive for the ‘Business & Marketing’ Category

Trinity Entrepreneurial Society is currently hosting a series of talks on different aspects of launching a business such as ideation, pitching and emerging technology.

The organisation has been so-so. The first event was announced the day before and placed on Halloween when many of us had plans. Another two of the events were cancelled at short notice. And there was meant to be a social aspect to it but this did not happen, I assume due to low numbers. That itself was frustrating because you hav to apply to to the programme and there is an attendance policy, but that is all false scarcity.

With that moan out of the way, though, the events that did run were great. The speakers were from a range of company sizes with good knowledge and I got to meet Alison Darcy, the founder of Woebot!

Leeds Anxiety Clinic has launched its YouTube channel! Join us over on YouTube to learn more about anxiety and OCD.

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others is a book by Dan Pink. In it, he argues that the old ABCs of sales (always be closing) have been replaced by a new, more authentic and honest approach to sales.

His case is essentially this: the old way of sales relied on information asymmetry. The salesperson knew more than the customer and could use that to their advantage. However, in the information age, the customer has often done a lot of research and in many cases knows more than the salesperson (such as competitor offerings) and therefore you cannot bullshit a customer anymore.

So, what do we do about it? Pink argues that we need to be empathetic towards our customers. Understand how we can help them and build a way to win together, rather than seeing sales as a zero-sum game where we have to get one over on the customer.

We should give them all in the information they need and not be afraid of doing so. He gives the example of CarMax, an American car superstore brand that provides computers for customers to research what their competitors are doing so they know that CarMax is offering the best deal.

Finally, be clear on what you are offering. Pink suggests an elevator pitch may be too long for the modern generation who are used to 140-character tweets. Pink suggests a number of successors to the elevator pitch including one-word pitches (when I say “search”…), questions and rhymes.

Four years ago I launched Worfolk Anxiety and since then I’ve trained tens of thousands of students via my online mental health courses. Worfolk Anxiety Management is still a key brand but of course, there is much more to mental health and wellbeing than anxiety and my current range of courses reflects that.

To reflect this wider focus on mental wellbeing, I’ve launched a new brand, Online Mindfulness School. The doors are now open with our mindfulness teacher, mental health ambassador and mindfulness for productivity courses and lots more on the way.

Back in 2013, I started a publishing company to publish my fledging restaurant guide. What originally started as a side hustle alongside my IT consultancy company has since expanded into a digital publishing and after years of work, has finally turned a profit in the 2019/2020 accounting year. Who says 2020 is nothing but misery?

They say that the necessity is the mother of all invention. With the impending COVID-19 crisis looming, we decided it was finally time to make virtual appointments part of Leeds Anxiety Clinic’s offerings.

That was easier said than done. Because of the social distancing recommendations already in effect, and Amazon having halted warehouse shipments, the few webcams that were available had all been panic-bought by other people. Luckily, we were able to beg and borrow the equipment we needed until we could get our own.

We’re still playing around with how to produce the best quality experience, both in terms of the technical setup and the differences between delivering therapy face-to-face, where you can easily scribble a diagram or analyse holistic body movements, and delivering it digitally. Early efforts are working well, though.

I’ve launched a new course on creating Facebook ads. Here is the blurb:

Do you want to master Facebook Ads? Maybe you’re an entrepreneur or small business owner looking to reach new customers. A marketer looking for new audiences. Or maybe you’re new to digital marketing and want to find out what it can do for you.

This is a complete beginner to advanced course: we’ll cover the basics from setting up your account and creating your first campaign to advanced topics like split testing, retargeting and instant experiences.

It’s a big course: three and a half hours of full HD video showing you exactly how to create ads as you follow my screen.

What do you do if you need to scale your Scrum team? Ideally, have multiple teams and use one of the many fine methods for scaling with multiple teams. But what if you want to scale a single team? To say, 30 people?

This was the situation I ran into with a recent client. They had an important project and lots of money to throw at it, and they wanted it all to be one team.

You might think “but there is no way that could possibly work”. And you would be correct. It didn’t work that well. But, having no other option, we did find some hacks that made it easier. I’ll present these below.

Kim’s Corners

Doing a stand-up with 30 people is tough. You might think it took ages. But it didn’t. We got done in 15 minutes. There were so many people (in a special meeting room we had to book every day) that people kept it short and sweet. From that point of view, it was a good learning experience.

But it wasn’t useful. There was so much stuff going on that nobody could remember what everyone else has said. Most people did not even try. They just tuned out for most of it.

So, we moved to Kim’s Corners. Each workstream had a corner and we went around one corner at a time. The people in that corner listened to each other intently, while only taking a high-level overview of what the other corners said.

Goldfish Bowl

Having a retro was also challenging because there were so many people wanting to weight in. To solve this, we used the Goldfish Bowl technique.

This involves having five chairs in the middle of the room. Four people sit on them, with one empty chair. Everyone else sits around in a big circle. Only the people in the inner chairs are allowed to talk on the topic at hand, and the discussions are time-boxed to five minutes. The group can vote to allow another five minutes if required.

What if you are sat on the outside? You go into the circle and claim the empty chair. At which point, someone from the inner circle is obliged to get up and go back to the outer circle, freeing up a chair to be the new empty chair. Anyone who has a strong opinion can take a chair, but without too many people talking at once.

Refinement Lucky Dip

30 people were too many people to have sat around looking at a Jira board and pointing stories up. So, we used a lucky dip system in which five people were randomly selected to attend backlog refinement sessions.

Anyone else that particularly wanted to be involved, perhaps because they had the a specific knowledge or interest in a piece of work that was upcoming, was also welcome to attend. But they were not required or expected to attend otherwise.

If you’ve tried uploading an SRT file to a video on Facebook, you may encounter an error like this:

The captions file you selected is in a format that we don’t support.

What’s wrong? You cry, not that you’re using the standard format for SRT files. It could be that Facebook is throwing an unnecessary hissy fit because you’re using zero-indexing in the blocks, but more likely to be something even simpler: the filename.

Facebook insists that the files are named filename.en_GB.srt, or whatever language combination you are using (for example, filename.en_US.srt. If you don’t include the “.en_GB” bit, Facebook will reject the file, even though it’s a valid SRT file.

As soon as you add that the filename, it works!

Happy advertising.

In June, I launched my course Digital Marketing for Restaurants to help restaurant owners and managers access new customers via digital media. Since then over a thousand people have enrolled on it and it has achieved a 5-star rating.

I’m now pleased to announce that I have launched a brand new digital marketing course, this time for therapists and counsellors.

It covers building websites, using Google Ads, using Google My Business, Facebook pages, posts and ads, and using Eventbrite. It’s available now on Udemy and you can preview it here.

Here’s the preview video: