Networking events can be daunting! A room full of strangers and one needs to grow around smiling and making connections! Whew! I found this really tough at the start of my last Account Management role. Although we were supposed to manage a set of Accounts we had to grow the business externally if existing Accounts didn’t increase their orders. Hence started a saga of events from local entrepreneur meetups to high costing multi day conferences in Nice. The last one wasn’t too bad actually … got more sun & sand then contacts 🙂
After a while I sat down to analyze the end result of all these networking events? Zilch!zero new revenue from these events!! Most new business came from customers references or older contacts. Yet we spend an enormous amount of money chasing that lonely CIO waiting patiently for us with a multi million pound contract in his jacket. As you might guess it never happened.
Many years later I started TechMeetups focused on Startups & Entrepreneurs helping them achieve their goals and realise their dreams. I started organising small & big events and realised that the challenges I personally faced many years ago were the same challenges we were putting our community startups through. So we started evolving. In CMM terminology thats PCM & TCM (Process & Technology Change Management). How do we change our processes to make our services better? and what new technology can we use to help making this process more useful to our members?
Well we spent many days debating and discussing this and trying out various types of events and gatherings. Finally we hit upon a key learning – Attendees want to engage and don’t want to be lectured upon! So we focused on attendee engagement. Trying to maximise what each attendee learnt and took away from our events.
We wanted everyone to feel that:
1. They’re not faced with the daunting task of ‘working’ a room full of strangers
2. Not face hours of lectures and presentations – powerpoint hell
3. They genuinely learned about what other startups are working on
4. Perhaps few of the learnings could be applied to their own startups
5. Make useful and deep connections that would exist beyond the event
Finally after quite a few events in 2013 we hit upon a workshop format. It has a combination of one on one mentoring followed by principles of speed dating to group presentation and feedback and finishing off with your good old beer & pizza networking. What we found is after going through this ‘engineered’ process members really were on a high with the learning & connections! Everyone felt
So we have now planned a series of such workshops in 2014 from London to Singapore across 12 of our communities.
List of Startup Workshops …
- Cambridge Startup Workshop
- Barcelona Startup Workshop
- New York Startup Workshop
- London Fintech Startup Workshop
- Amsterdam Startup Workshop
- Dublin Startup Wrokshop
- Munich Startup Workshop
- Vienna Startup Workshop
- London Fintech Startup Workshop
We hope this will help our attendees get the best of a simple meetup event and really help them launch their startup or learn more about a particular sector of focus. Hope to see you in one of them 🙂
Founder TechMeetups
