6 hours, 5 people, a lot of coffee, and truffle honey.

A couple of years ago, I tried a networking experiment: booking myself to be in London for 48 hours, and asking people to invite me to meet them in places of their choosing. Lots of people engaged with it, and others followed the adventure on social media with interest.

And it got me thinking that I should try and do something like it again. But finding 48 hours in the midst of various client projects, and family responsibilities isn’t that easy… so I took the most of the opportunity of being in the capital to deliver a bookkeeping workshop for Unltd to come down a little earlier than I might have otherwise, and put word out that I’d be around for an afternoon (6 hours) to see what serendipity LinkedIN might magic up…

And what an enjoyable 6-hour stint it turned out to be:

• Discovering truffle honey with Martin Gilbraith, whilst reflecting on how MeetUp has facilitated UK facilitators to more easily network and support each other;

• Finally meeting Andrea Gamson properly in person (after we’ve missed each other at conferences ad festivals we’ve both spoken at in the past, had several phone calls, and generally stalked each other in social media over the years), and being confused for my namesake, Robert Ashton (although to be fair, our respective beads are probably quite similar to each others’ at the moment…)

• Learning of Roxanne Persaud’s muse, the Maid of Fail, and how a Phd thesis can become like Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy;

• Receiving my first Christmas card of the year from Richard Hull, and over the magic of coffee, creating a new model and format for guest lectures on social enterprise and social entrepreneurship education (although we’ll have to wait until spring 2020 to release it on the world!)

• And finally, making an entrance with Eddie Capstick without having to enter the room (I phoned him from the other side of the window he was sitting in). But his choice of last venue came well equipped for his being the last name on my ‘dance card’ for this 6-hour speed networking dash around Kings Cross.

So – thank you all for the creativity, insight, new experiences, and shared laughs. Hopefully I can find an excuse to do it again before another whole year passes, and also not just in London…

too prudish or too offensive?

As a freelancer, I have a lot more freedom than my employed counterparts (something that I've used over the years to challenge and change national policy and legislation, openly argue with some of the direction that sector bodies suggest their members should be taking, and so on - in effect, being a 'modern day prophet').

But while this may sound quite exciting and glamorous, there is also an associated risk - in not being part of an ongoing team, having a line manager, and such like, there's a risk that I may start to believe my own hype, and end up 'going off on one'... which is something I've always sought to avoid through how I've designed part of my business model.

And this usually plays out ok - but sometimes it may mean that I go a step 'too far'.

I recently tweeted whilst on my way to deliver a workshop for a client that would be being attended by a range of people thinking about starting up their own business in the future. I glibly referred to the fact that I was looking forward to busting some of the myths and hype that surround business plans and included a picture of some of my 'learning aides' that any who's ever been in one of my courses will recognise.

For 14 years no-one has ever had an issue with any of these types of toys/gimmicks/props (with the exception of one person who suffered from the diagnosed medical condition pediophobia), but on this occasion, my client phoned me within minutes to ask me to delete it as they felt some people may find some of the content offensive.

Now - I'm not their employee, and neither did our contracted terms relate to anything which said they could direct what I could or couldn't say in my own right, so I could easily have said 'no'. 

But I've always had the approach that if someone's not happy with something that's happened, my first response isn't to find excuses or dodge potential blame, but rather find the quickest way to fix things so everyone can keep on getting along.

So I deleted it.

But, being me, I surreptitiously sought a view from the people attending the workshop about the items in the picture - asking if any of them were offended by any of them (some of which have also featured in national prime-time tv shows). They all said that they couldn't see any problem with any of them.

Which leaves me wondering - are clients sometimes too prudish in what they think others might think, rather than asking those same people, before acting on imagined fears; or am I starting to push the boundaries a little too far...?

(...and even though I've anonymised details so no-one will know who I'm referring to, will the client recognise themselves, and get even more upset with me?)

member only content

there seems to be an increasing trend on the internet towards content being hosted behind paywalls - the number of emails I now receive with links to research, features, and articles which are increasingly marked as 'member only content' when I try to read them, is starting to annoy me...

I fully appreciate that in an increasingly fragmented economy, people need to find novel and clever ways of being able to earn a living (or something approximating one), and so the potential to earn 'micro payments' of a few pence from people clicking to read your blog post or news feature may seem innocuous enough. But I'm concerned it may herald the dawn of a new net age of digital inequality - not from access to the technology which is the current digital divide, but from not being able to access information or learning when you do.

When the internet was created, it was intended to be as freely open and available to as many people as possible. A principle that chimes with the declaration of human rights, whose Article 26 states that everyone has the right to education [to be able to access learning], and that this should be free; and Article 27 which says that we should all be able to freely participate in the cultural life of our [on-line] community. 

If we start putting up charges to access content, then we start to limit the sharing our learning and experiences with each other - we start to segregate our communities into those who can afford to 'play with us' and those who can't. Which means that potentially increasingly large numbers of people will lose access to articles and research that could help to further understanding, constructively challenge prejudice and bias, and generally create a more consistent experience for us all on-line and in our lives.

I also appreciate the argument that we only truly value things we've paid for, but if the established norm in the marketplace of internet blogs and articles was that they were freely shared, then surely we need to be having a wider and deeper conversation about the effects that our use of 'member only content' may be creating in exacerbating inequality, stopping prejudice and bias from being able to be challenged as they could/should be, and generally increasingly p!ssing people off who are trying to contribute to the overall pool of knowledge and learning at the cost of our own time, in keeping with the original spirit of the internet, only to see others seemingly starting to exploit it for selfish gains...?

the danger of believing 'official statistics'...

Some of you may recall how I've argued in the past about how we should take the 'encouragements' and direction offered by our sector bodies with more than a generous handful of salt...

And I've based those arguments on where such bodies get their money from, and whom they're trying to curry favour with rather than asking us what their priorities should be; (don't believe me? Think back to the last time a sector body you're in membership of openly asked you what they should be doing on your behalf, openly published the results, and then reported on how far they'd delivered against those).

Some of you also know that I have a habit at looking at published research and data - not as a trained mathematical/economic analyst, but rather as an 'enthusiastic amateur', to see what new (or contradictory) stories they might offer to help us better understand ourselves and the issues we face.

And my latest 'rummaging' concerns the NCVO's Almanac and Social Enterprise UK's 'State of the Sector' survey. And the reason for picking these two august bodies? I'm refreshing some of the training courses and materials I deliver around governance in the sector, and though it might be interesting to see what both sources have to say about latest trends (as they both map legal forms adopted in the sector, and both published their current findings for the same year: 2017).

As with all surveys from different bodies, they've framed and categorised data relating to the same question against a range of different options and headings, but with a bit of rough transposition on my part, what seems to emerge is a picture of some confusion:

Quite some difference.

But so what you might say (and perhaps rightly so) - NCVO is concerned with those organisations who are predominately volunteer dependent (hence the title), whereas SEUK is concerned with enterprises that are trading - so we'd expect to see a difference, right?

Well, here's why I think this is more of an issue for us than we might think it is:

1) Policy makers, funders, and commissioners all group charities and social enterprises together into a single pot (hence the term 'civil society'). 

They don't differentiate in the way that our sector bodies do, so when they come to make policy and pass legislation that will affect us, how can we have confidence they're making the right choices when the data we're presenting them with to do so appears to be so contradictory?

2) Where the data comes from. 

NCVO's Almanac draws upon several external, objective, and credited sources, so should be pretty sound. SEUK's data is largely a collation of the returns they've received to a call for survey responses from groups in the sector - so their data is only as good as the people who fill out the forms. And that could be more of a problem than we'd like to admit: as a result they list sole traders as recognised legal types of social enterprise in their report (not sure anyone else would?), and 6% of all the CICs who responded weren't able to identify or be categorised as to whether they have share capital or not which, when added together with the other 'uncertain' responses, shows that over 10% of all respondents whose data has been collated and published as reflecting the realities of the sector today don't know what their legal form is - so how can we trust that they'll be any more accurate in other data that they give?

Let me put this another way - if we were building a house wouldn't we want to have confidence in the nature of the foundations, and that the way they'd been created would subsequently stand up to scrutiny from a variety of inspectors and other builders to ensure that what we're building doesn't come crashing down around us in the future when the weather gets rough..? 

If the data we use to act as the comparable 'bedrock' in shaping support, interventions, and lobbying for the sector is found to be suspect in the future, isn't there therefore a risk that a lot of efforts now would be wasted, hence why it's important to make sure we test such data today..?

As with any mapping exercise, there will always be ways in which the methodologies used, and the way the analysis on data captured can be criticised. My reason for doing so here isn't to belittle or reduce the efforts of these 2 bodies, but rather encourage us to pause before citing an 'official statistic' about our sector to make sure that we can be confident that it really is accurate, and in everyone's best interests to be using for the reasons we are.



UPDATE - 19 Sept 2018

There's been some new mapping research published today by Social Enterprise UK that seems to have picked up on some of these 'vagaries' I've outlined, and offers a more robust methodology in starting to scope the true shape and size of the social enterprise sector: https://www.socialenterprise.org.uk/the-hidden-revolution

Also, there's been some good debate and rebuttals and cross-rebuttals over on LinkedIn that you may also want to check out (including from the ex-deputy chief exec at Social Enterprise UK!): https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6447793971262418944

what I'm doing to help fix a £14.9bn problem that's killing our economy...

There's a problem in the wider business community that's affecting everyone (and our livelihoods), and it's getting worse every year.

It's a problem that people struggle to feel able to talk about or openly challenge.

And it's a problem that's increasing the risk of pushing us back into recession, and leading to further business closures and job losses than we're already seeing and hearing about in the media.

And it's not red tape or (mental) health - it's money. More specifically, the challenge of late payment: customers who commission us to deliver work and goods for them, and then suddenly get out the big book of excuses when it comes to paying us what was agreed, so that they can hold onto the money that's rightly ours for longer.

It disproportionately hits small businesses and the self employed like me, as we don't have big financial reserves to cash flow the work, or employ finance teams who can chase up the money on our behalf (we have to take time out of earning from other work to do that ourselves). We also can't easily use the courts to chase the money, as that costs more cash and time to pursue, and also risks damaging our public reputation.

Late payment is also stifling the wider economy - most small businesses now don't feel that they can raise the money they need to invest in their growth and maintaining their competitiveness because late payment is causing problems for their cash-flow (which makes it harder to repay any loans), and they're having to take out more time to chase customers, rather than deliver more paying work elsewhere (further reducing their cash in, and profitability). And such declines in economic activity, production, and employment are often cited as causes of recession...

And when the cash runs out for us because we've not been paid the money we're owed - it's game over. Our enterprises fold, and we lose our livelihoods along with anyone we're employing. And for what reason? So that some larger corporate can hold onto the cash (which they already have plenty of) for a little longer.

Sadly it's not just big bad private businesses who are guilty of this. Government and the public sector are amongst amongst the worst offenders for not paying on time; and some of my work with charities and social enterprises has also seen this sector being guilty of not paying when bills fall due as well...

It's currently a £14.9bn problem, with the typical small business owed £11,000 and spending nearly a day a week trying to get the money paid that they're owed.

£14.9bn seems an overwhelming amount that nothing can surely be done about. Government have created a post of late payment commissioner to help change this culture, but they've had little (if any?) impact.

So what can a sole trader like me do about it? Well, I can make a pubic commitment to always and openly paying my suppliers on time (if not early) through being certified as a 'Pay On Time' supporter.

I can constructively challenge customers and clients who start to drag their feet in paying me what they owe me for my efforts on their behalf by using the Late Payment Act legislation (very easy and surprisingly effective!).

And I can do this openly and in a way that hopefully encourages others to start to do the same - and if you're reading this, that that means I'm challenging you to do the same!

Government have shown that they can't fix this problem, but the tools are there for us if we have the conviction, leadership, and resolve to get the job done ourselves. 

Who's with me?

how people I work with really see me... part 2 of 2

As a quick recap from my last blog post: last month I'd asked people to share some 360-degree feedback with me, sharing an image that to them best conjured up the image of what it was that I do, and how I do it.

Responses included a platypus, shoe, Howard the Duck, and an inflatable Christmas tree amongst others, as well as a gif of me fixing railway tracks while the train is still running on them!

But while those were useful in helping me better understand how people view me and how I approach working with them, they don't help me understand what makes me different to the other consultants, trainers, advisers, and cake-eaters out there. Which is why I also openly asked people:

"Having just been named the UK’s 'niche enterprise support 

consultant of 2018', what do you think my ‘niche’ is?"

The general gist of comments seem to show that my niche isn't as typically definable as it might be for typical consultant-types (i.e. a niche in governance for large organisations; or a specialism for equity crowdfunding; and such like). It seems people see my 'niche' as being more to do with how I can take what appears to be complex and confusing amounts of knowledge, and translate them back into ways that mean others can better get to grips with things that are useful and relevant for them. It seems I also do this in ways that mean people are more confident in being able to work with this new leaning too.

And as with the pictures people shared, I'm encouraged by this - niches are usually defined by a specific type of knowledge or particular skill, yet I've always maintained that any of us can learn any knowledge or skill once we see the point and need for them (I had to resit my maths exam at school but subsequently managed and grew enterprise loan funds; support groups apply for investment; and deliver an accredited course in financial management!). 

For me, it's the relationships we make and work through are more important if we're serious about being inspired and motivated by our values. It's also through the relationships we have that we're able to gather the support and encouragement we need to achieve our aspirations in the way we want to, and ultimately change the world in some way.

In the interests of transparency I've include a full set of the responses below - although despite it being listed on my LinkedIN profile as one of my professional skills people can endorse me for, no-one mentioned my expertise in eating cake...

As a final thought, I'd like to thank everyone who took the time to reply to my open call for suggestions (and for making sure I could repost all your comments without having to edit them for swearing!) - as with lots of other ways I approach how I work, this way of seeking 360-degree feedback as part of my CPD is unusual, but seem far more enjoyable for all of us than the usual questionnaire type forms.

All responses received in response to the question: Adrian's niche is...?

I have always said you are good at promoting yourself. I would definitely say that is a strength. Some people will criticise self-promotion, but relationships are everything if you’re a consultant and this must be an element of maintaining networks and relationships by having a presence and trying to stay in people’s minds?

You use props to get attention, to engage, to play, to make light to make things accessible and it's in a way comedy and fun. but there is so much behind everything you do, the preparation, the observation the analysis. You walk this line between entertainer and ridiculously intelligent and knowledgeable scholar. And I think your niche has always been being so accessible and yet inspiring with awe how much you know and how readily you admit to what you don't. You are you and you empower others to be the same! A rare gem!

The third sector expert

Making complex things simple. Also you are most definitely "The acceptable face of Accounting" 

Your niche: early stage small businesses....especially those who are scared into inaction regarding their accounts and book keeping

You share information, spontaneously and generously / you have a creative approach to what you do / you have strong values and a focus on strengths / you really know your stuff, but wear your 'expert' hat lightly

I would say that your knowledge and understanding of the sector and in particular how to prove the impact we have is the main strength of yours. Your ability to work with a range of people at different levels is also a strength.

Your written blogs and so on which are always valuable and help us learn more and debate things we probably need to get to grips with.

Remarkable ability to raise awareness of the critical issues affecting SMEs and the entrepreneurs and freelancers who run them. You are also good with plastic Christmas Trees and fairy light decorations. You are a super hero of endeavour, with a good sense of humour, and untidy shelves, full of stuff...

how people I work with really see me... - part 1 of 2

Chances are, you're familiar with some of the memes that go around Facebook and the like, where people share how others see what they do vs. what they actually do:

And recently, one of these got me thinking about how others I work with might see me differently to each other (and even to how I view myself). So in the interests of trying to make sure I can build on, and develop better relationships with clients and collaborators, (and continuing to have fun with my CPD framework!), last month I openly asked: 

"Is there a picture or an image that you associate with me/what I do/how I do it?"

And people replied with great enthusiasm, as the below montage illustrates:

I even had someone source a GIF!

Now, some of these images may seem a bit obscure... so in the interests of helping make sure their contributors' thinking doesn't get mis-interpreted, here's the list of notes that some people felt they should attach to their responses:

- ‘connecting energy’ 

- the platypus (as seen in this old TV ad) is unconventional and challenging / customer focused / likes to do things differently 

- Beer, cake and props: lobbing them all in together because each in their own way demonstrate your down-to-earth, fun, jovial personality

- Apparently in some cultures a clapping of the 'shoe' is a sign of respect. In others the throwing of the 'shoe' is a sign of disdain. (and this contributor also suggested that as the 'Super Hero of Entrepreneurial Endeavour', I'm also a SHoEE!)

- and the GIF = “Here’s relentless Adrian, dealing with anything and everything is his way!” 

(others simply felt that the image alone was sufficient explanation).

And as fun as this obviously was as an experiment, I also think that it largely assures me that some of my values and the ways in which I try and approach working with clients, and in project teams with others, are consistent with what I'm trying to achieve.

But as much as pictures can tell a story of a thousand words, they they don't always allow us to convey what we really think about someone, with regards to what differentiates them us others. And my purpose in undertaking these 360 degree-type feedback exercises on myself is to always help me further my role and standing in the marketplaces I work in.

Which is why I also asked an alternate question:

"Having just been named the UK’s 'niche enterprise support consultant of 2018', 

what do you think my ‘niche’ is?"

...and I'll reveal what people said in response to that in part 2 of this mini-series.