So you’re a good storyteller. Are you a good story listener??

Since my book deadline conspired against me going on my annual Inspiration Trip to Texas, I’ve been keen to make sure I soak up the best of what London has to offer with talks and events throughout February and March. Last Friday I went to my first ‘The Story’ a one-day conference at The Conway Hall where a mix of artists, writers, digital producers and bloggers shared their storytelling experiences.

Storytelling is important to me as it unites all the projects I juggle. Whether I’m writing my new book or advising a client on how to communicate their offering, it’s all about stories. 2011’s 'The Story' had a good line-up, from the comedy writer Graham Linehan to the photographer Martin Parr. There were also a few surprises; I didn’t think I’d be that interested in Phil Gyford’s story, the guy behind Pepys’ Diary. But it was fascinating to hear how Phil has taken a story from the 17th Century and used digital tools to tell it now, from daily blog posts to Twitter. With 50% of his online community over the age of 60 it was great to hear an online success story that was not about young people.

But the stand-out for me was Karl James, a performer and director who runs The Dialogue Project, where he uses recorded conversation to explore people’s life stories. Karl played some audio clips of conversations reminding us about the importance of listening. He says we’re missing out by not listening properly, and I think he's right. In one audio clip where he’s asking the father of a child with leukemia about his feelings, there’s a gap of 19 seconds between Karl's question and the father's response. Karl didn’t try and fill that silence, he needed that silence to hear the right story. Through another example, he showed us that sometimes the story is not where you’re expect it to be, and that you need to listen to give it the freedom to get there.

Karl gave me such a simple but essential takeaway - how good are we at listening? In a crowded and noisy world full of multiple stories on multiple platforms are we pausing to listen? So I’m embarking on my own listening strategy, with my family, my friends, clients and people I’m interviewing for my book. I’m going to be listening more.

If you’re looking for a lesson in business visit a market stall

Nothing represents the essence of enterprise better to me than the (not so) humble market stall. At London’s Spitalfields Market a trader can rent a stall for just £10 a day (weekday rate). Here he or she can sell their products, whether home-made bags or second hand records. At the end of the day, they have a simple cash return for their efforts. Think about it: just ten quid, some homemade ‘stuff’ and you can try your hand at business!

Let’s not forget: ‘Business’ is not a complicated science – it’s just about taking an idea, and turning it into a reality.

Recently I have been acting as a mentor for a bunch of sixth form students at The English Martyrs School in Hartlepool. This is all part of Global Entrepreneurship Week’s Education Challenge where school students develop business ideas of their own. I was pleased to hear my students’ idea was all about selling Christmas kits on a local market stall. I’ve really enjoyed the process: the students’ questions about their business idea are refreshingly straight forward, simple yet also important. You can check out some videos where I captured answers to their questions here.

So if you’re looking to explore the basics of business, forget The City, Wall Street, business plans, board rooms, and big corporations – just check out the goings on at your local market. 

My Year of Exploration

So how did you score on meeting new people in 2010?

Lots of people and organisations don’t seem to extend their networks. They hang out, work and collaborate with the *same* people, year in, year out. The long-term staffers, clients and suppliers don’t change. It’s all very predictable and safe. Yawn!

Being self-employed I’ve always been stimulated by my ability to renew and refresh who I work with, who I hang out with. I can change that whenever I fancy.

Hey, but nothing wrong with the long-term contacts. I have friendships and business relationships that have endured over fifteen years and that I value highly. But the relationships that promise to shake-up my business and fuel inspiration are those new people I meet. People in unrelated fields, doing totally different things challenge and inspire me in equal measures.

Those connections are often more about personal development than business development. I’m not selling them anything, but inevitably they evolve to a relationship of reciprocity where we help each other, work with each other. Or maybe not, we just have a damn good lunch.

So back in January I set a goal of meeting at least one new person a week this year. Looking back , I did at least that: not quick handshakes at a conference, I mean quality exchanges over a coffee. Some of those connections have come from existing contacts who are good at ‘I don’t know if there’s anything in it, but you must meet Sam’ type of introductions. Others are more random or have come via Twitter. This year Twitter has brought me a new client, a book deal, some great stories for my blog and just some good espresso time.

Has it been good for my business? Yep. Has it been good for my soul? You bet.

“What was your ROI on all those connections” a friend asked me. “I don’t know” is my honest answer. But what I do know is that renewal feeds my ideas and I intend to keep up the pace of making the effort to meet a bunch of totally new people in 2011.

Because who knows where it will take you? So get out there and go explore…

* above is me and a bunch of new people at SXSW 2010. Picture credit: Marc Salsberry

Lewis Howes: Making It Up As I Go Along

Lewis Howes used to play American football for a living. When a sports injury put him out of the game for six months he had to find ways to make a living. He had zero business experience but knew what he wanted to achieve. So without any great plan he set about building some businesses and writing a book. His first book was all about LinkedIn, a platform that Lewis is passionate about after having spent many hours each day learning how to exploit as a business tool. He now travels extensively giving talks alongside running popular webinars. 

What I like about his story is how Lewis reinvented himself and created successful businesses with no great plan. He's made it up as he gone along. I hung out with Lewis and here’s a two minute video of our chat.

How To Stay Afloat: Lessons In Business Survival

Over the last two months I’ve been talking to business owners about how they are surviving in a tough marketplace. From a manufacturing business in Essex to a web-based apps business in Chicago, I’ve been hearing stories about staying authentic, about reinvention and busting a few business myths to survive. These stories appear in my column this month for the ‘Owners Only’ pages at BNET.com. 


Here are links to the 4 columns:

1.  “The 37signals Secret to Success: Sell Your By-Products” – lessons from 37signals’ David Heinemeier Hansson in acknowledging your business by-products

2.  “How to Survive a Market Collapse: Reinvent Your Business” – lessons from Splice TV on beating market challenges

3.  “How to Set Your Sights High — and Still Pay the Bills” – how start-up Karrot Entertainment is developing essential revenues whilst building intellectual properties

4.  "Does Your Business Really Have to Grow to Survive?" – how Excalibur Screwbolts is beating the competition by sticking to its core strengths.

I hope you find them useful.

Business Stories #3: Make Believe, the storytelling agency

My last company profile this week is Make Believe, the agency that's evangelising the power of stories to help businesses find their way through difficult times.

Storytelling might be the oldest and most effective form of communication, but even so it might seem an unexpected prescription for organisations suffering tough times in 2010. Make Believe, a London-based agency with a global client base is evangelising that the principles of storytelling can be used to help organisations manage change and to get leaders back on track.

Today so much more is expected of leaders. Whether you’re CEO of BP or the Prime Minister, leaders know that success is about being a good communicator, and for that you need to be a good storyteller. Make Believe work with multinational corporations like Microsoft, Coors and Unilever helping bring their story alive.

I met with Make Believe senior partner Sally Osman who recalled a story of how the beam from a lighthouse helps a ship steer its course through a violent storm. She believes having a powerful story at the heart of a business can become your guiding light ‘in good times, rough times and changing times’.

Sally explained that most clients approach Make Believe because they’re ‘stuck’ - they acknowledge they need a different approach to solve a business challenge. The agency applies a seven-step process to get under the skin of a client’s business to challenge and redefine a company’s narrative. “So many companies are going at 90 miles per hour, they forget where they’ve come from or where they’re going” says Sally.

Great stories can make difficult things easier to grasp; they can make an idea or strategy visually strong, leaving it clear and memorable. Apply these questions to help your business use storytelling to regain focus and direction:

1. Have your staff forgotten what it is the company stands for? Retelling your story with their input can help redefine your organisational culture and get everyone united with a common purpose.
2. Do your clients, and the marketplace at large, ‘get’ what you do or are you telling a story that’s out of date? Many businesses tell the story of what they used to be, rather what they really are, and that disconnect can dent their market potential.
3. Are you struggling with defining and communicating your strategy and business plan? Try visualising it with a story: people may not remember a business plan, but great stories are unforgettable.

So if your business has lost its way, try retelling your story, whether internally to get the organisation back on-track, or externally to get clients to understand how you’ve changed. In a competitive and ever-changing marketplace, it might be a case of he who has the best story, wins.

Business Stories #2: Alex, the user-designed computer

In the second of this week's profiles of companies behind new ideas, this is the story of  The Broadband Computer Company who have developed a new computer focused very much on the user.


Like many executives of his generation, Andy Hudson was a late adopter of computers, finally getting to grips with a laptop about ten years ago. His frustration struggling with an over--complex operating system led him to develop a computing package - ‘alex’ -  targeted at late adopters and the previously ‘digitally excluded’. Andy is now co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at the UK's Broadband Computer Company a tech start--up that raised £2.5 million to develop and launch ‘alex’.


Andy told me how he’d actually designed the front-end interface in PowerPoint before assembling a team of developers to take his idea to reality.‘alex' has been designed very much with the end user in mind, providing an easy to use bundled package of computer and operating system. The intuitive user interface was a direct response to Andy’s own experience and his frustrations. His eureka moment seemed so simple: “Why is it so hard? Users don’t want drop-down menus to make choices. If I want to do something, why can’t I just press one button?”


Andy told me the product had been designed from the ‘customer back’ unlike most tech products that are devised and pushed at the market. Before a nationwide launch, The Broadband Computer Company soft-launched the service to a group of 150 paying users in the North East Of England, close to the company’s base. Andy explained how critical this soft launch was in the development of the product. “We learnt a lot of lessons playing with that group of paying customers in the trial. They identified problems with the system that we just hadn’t spotted during development”. Instead of  a Mac or Windows operating system, ‘alex' has its own suite of programs each with a bright colored on-screen button. To the technologically literate it might look over simple but then it hasn't been designed for the early adopter iPad user. 


Identifying a clear market niche for the product by placing the user at the heart of the business idea, based on Andy’s own frustrations seems to have resonated with customers in the trial. The business is now seeking more funding to invest in marketing and a major nationwide launch. There’s a long way to go before ‘alex’ becomes a well known brand, in the meantime Andy says he continues to be motivated by customer feedback, "When you receive emails from users saying that you have changed their lives - it inspires you to carry on".

Business Stories : #1 Gibli.com, the knowledge trading website

This week I'm profiling three companies who have developed ideas and products to solve age-old business problems. The first is start-up Gibli.com, who've come up with an idea to help small businesses fill their knowledge gaps.



When pharmaceutical data company CEO Charles Joynson was struggling to find out information about doing business in the Netherlands, his dilemma gave him an idea. What if businesses who had questions could connect with others who had the answers? The result is Gibli.com, a ‘knowledge trading' website where experts can trade their know-how online in the same way people buy and sell on EBay.


The idea was born from Charles’ own struggle to find detailed information to launch a new product, “critically we failed to uncover the key facts that in the end were crucial”, he explained. That was the catalyst for the website which connects businesses with experts. Gibli only launched in April 2010 and the site now has around 150 signed up members with 100 site visits a day.


Talking to potential users prior to launch revealed that many felt there was a gap between sourcing free advice on the internet and paying for a consultant, giving Charles the confidence that there was a niche that Gibli could fill. “They suggested that the free advice on the internet was questionable, and you couldn’t always tell who the writer was. But if you paid a consultant to help you it could cost thousands. So we decided to let experts charge what they liked for slices of their knowledge”.


Charles quickly learnt the importance of assembling a talented team to fill his own knowledge vacuums. “Gibli was one of those projects which needed the input of other talented individuals to create something useful, rather than a single flash of inspiration on my part. In that way I was able to pull resources into the team to compensate for my own weaknesses.” Charles acknowledges the irony in the discovery that if he couldn't solve it on his own, he needed to get help “If only Gibli.com had existed then, I could have solved my own problem!"


The initial idea evolved as he sought contributions from others, experiencing what he describes as a ‘series of little eureka moments’ along the way. His business mentor played a really valuable role; one of her early recommendations was the importance of design to deliver the optimum user-experience. Charles had always been cynical about the value of design in a project but his mentor introduced him to designers who helped visualize the concept, adding a lot of value to the offering.


The expertise he’s brought in has strengthened Gibli's offering, making it stronger than his initial idea. He's now a firm advocate of the need to seek advice from experts. "I now know that if your trust the talented people around you, you will end up with something considerably better than you could have done on your own. And that’s what Gibli is all about".