The Sikh Geek

Last week was MSDUK’s Business Opportunity Fair at the Emirates Stadium. It was their first such event and it was supported by a delegation of US Minority Businesses brought over by NMSDC (National Minority Supplier Development Council). The night before I was lucky enough to be at a Reception hosted at the residence of the US Economic Minster which is part of the US Embassy in the UK.

The Business Opportunity Fair had a range of businesses exhibiting from UK Minority Businesses and Corporates such as JP Morgan, Enterprise Rent-a-Car, Lehman Brothers and many more. It was a great mixture of small to large businesses and everything in between. There were some great keynote speeches but the one that got me engaged was the one by Ralph G. Moore of RGMA Associates who provides business advice to Corporates and Suppliers. His point was forget thinking about getting a contract just because you’re a minority business and focus on being just the best business. That’s always been my view that once you get into the "Minority" mindset then you limit your own horizons and aspirations. Conversely, Corporate Procurement Buyers need to look beyond their traditional supply chains so that they can access new and innovative products/services. We need to be the best at what we do and scale to take up the challenges of supplying to corporate organisations which is where strategic alliances come in and as you know collaborative and partnership based working is something I believe deeply in.

I met some great people and one of these was a young woman Entrepreneur named Kanchana Raman, CEO of Avionsystems. She’s got a great technology business and the fact that she’s a Malayasian born Young Woman running a growing technology business in the US really says something.

The US businesses were big and some had multi-billion dollar turnovers but one thing each had was that the CEO’s/Owners were all down to earth.

It was great event and has given me renewed enthusiasm to achieve more.

One of my customers is Minority Supplier Development UK and if you want to know more about them then I’ve just uploaded one of their videos up on to YouTube. We’re doing a new Sharepoint site for them which hopefully I’ll be able to share soon.

Today was I was at the East Midlands Conference Centre on the Nottingham University Campus. Another good event with some great Minority businesses and Corporate buyers from PepsiCo, HP and Capital One.

Brian Tippens who heads HP’s global diversity programme had come over from the US and was very enthusiastic and obviously very committed. The US just gets this, that having a diverse supplier base makes business sense. There’s two reasons to doing it which is, it is the right thing to do and because you never know where innovation is going to come from.

There were lots of good networking opportunities with the other businesses and I met some great people doing great things.

It was interesting talking to Brian because he offered to put me in touch with his counterpart at Microsoft, Fernando Hernandez who is Microsoft’s Director of Supplier Diversity. One of the little known facts is that Microsoft is one of leaders in the area of Supplier Diversity.