I’ve just become the secretary for the FSB Leicester City branch at the AGM last night. The Federation of Small Businesses is a growing organisation and its membership has topped 200,000. It runs regular networking meetings and does a lot of political lobbying on issues that affect small businesses. Hopefully, I can make a positive contribution in my role as I know the current committee are looking to develop the events programme. At the following networking event last night we had to do a 60 second pitch to someone in the room we hadn’t met before, five times in a row. I have to say that I’m not very good at this because you can just tell by people’s faces! I’m not sure using words like “Mobility”, “Collaboration” or “Security” really means anything to most people. Afterwards I thought, may be I should’ve just showed people my Windows Smartphone and how I accessed email, contacts and calendar. Apparently, Emma, from Partner Perspectives had to do something similar recently, so its something I’m going to have to prepare for.
Filed under Uncategorized
Posted
by vijay on Tuesday, November 28th, 2006
![[This is a SBS Community blog you are reading. Are you subscribed to the Official SBS blog?]](http://www.sbslinks.com/images/sbsblogweb.jpg "This is a SBS Community Blog you are reading. Are you subscribed to the Official SBS blog?")
November 30th, 2006 at 1:32 pm
Congratulations on becoming the secretary of the Leicester branch FSB. As you might know we are also FSB members and this might provide a good opportunity to organise IT seminars aimed at SME’s. We have tried contacting the FSB about this previously, but have generally been met with apathy. Now we have someone who champions the IT cause in a position of influence maybe we can get things moving in a more positive manner. Let me have your thoughts on how you see things progressing.
November 30th, 2006 at 1:59 pm
The branch is looking to develop the events programme and your suggestion is something that is forefront in my mind. I’ve talked to Karl Craig-West, the chairman, about this before and the concerns are that it doesn’t become a huge sales pitch. Also, there were concerns that the FSB isn’t seen to favour one vendor e.g. Microsoft. If the seminar was giving small businesses a real learning opportunity, then I think there is some real scope. We can definitely discuss this further and see if we can come up with some ideas. The next committee meeting will probably be in January now.