ARON GELBARD

A BRIEF

Image from VGSN

Aron Gelbard is co-founder & CEO at Bloom & Wild, having launched the company in 2013.

Bloom & Wild''s mission is to make sending and receiving flowers the joy that it should be, and, in doing so, to build the world''s leading and most loved flower gifting brand.

Bloom & Wild is available in the UK, Germany, France and Ireland and is the top rated online florist in every market in which it operates and was named the UK’s second fastest growing company by Deloitte in 2017.

Prior to Bloom & Wild, Aron worked as a consultant to the consumer and technology sectors at Bain & Company in London and Silicon Valley

Aron will talk through the Bloom & Wild journey from starting out renting out space by the hour in New Covent Garden flower market all the way through to the company’s Series C fundraise and expansion across Europe. He will cover topics such as proving a concept, building a team, scaling marketing, the use of technology and fundraising. He will talk through how his own experiences as a founder have evolved at each of these steps.

BRAD BURTON

A BRIEF

Image from PoundSterlingLive

Brad Burton is the UK’s #1 Motivational Business Speaker. However, he left school with no qualifications, spent years on benefits before starting his own business in 2006. With £25,000 of debt he was delivering pizzas at weekends to help keep his business afloat. 10 years on, that business; 4Networking, now runs over 5,000+ business networking meetings each year with 1000’s of members.

An entertaining, humorous, thought provoking, high energy, motivational speaker, you''ll find out, that winning at life, is a whole lot more important than coming first in business.

Can someone really motivate you to positively change your life, career, business and direction in just 30 minutes? If you are waiting for a sign to make changes in your life.... this is it!

8 ways to motivate your workers and increase productivity

Here are some top tips to ensure you get your feedback right and manage your staff effectively, every time:

Thank you and Praise

Say thank you for contributions, day to day tasks done very well and for extra projects undertaken.
Praise their efforts and let them know you understand how much work was involved.

Be enthusiastic

Take real interest in employee’s goals. discuss how they can achieve this, empathise and encourage employee to develop and improve their skills, keep trying and never give up.

Recognise your employee’s contribution

Explaining to employee how their work contributes to the running of the organisation, give specific examples, will ohelp them understand how to do the job better.

Be clear and concise

Collect your comments into meaningful sets to make them easier to digest. Start each set with praise for what the employee did well and then make constructive suggestions as appropriate. For instance, a writing project could be broken down into content, impact, structure and accuracy.

Give examples and explain their impact

If you want your employee to change their behaviour, you should give an example of the behaviour you want them to change. For example, if the person often arrives late to meetings, give instances of when this behaviour occurred. Point out the ways that their lateness has affected other members of the team and/or the business.

Listen

Allow your employee to tell their side of the story – there may have been genuine reasons behind their behaviour, rather than a careless attitude. Make sure that any request to change is made in a non-aggressive manner and take their comments into consideration. Both the giver and receiver of the feedback should walk away feeling that a fair resolution was achieved.

Don’t compare their work to yours

Ask yourself if the person’s performance was adequate for the purpose, rather than comparing it with how you would have done it. For example, if you are reviewing a piece of writing, think about whether it will do the job it was intended to do, rather whether you’d have written it that way. People can be demotivated by ‘red pen’, and they will not be able to learn from comments they do not understand.

The suggestion sandwich

Start with positive comments about the person’s strengths and successes. Follow this with constructive suggestions about how to perform even better, allowing them to comment and ask questions. Finally, bring in some additional positive points and encourage them to feel motivated to introduce the changes you have suggested.
Many business owners find delivering what they might call “negative feedback” difficult, but by following these suggestions, both employee and employer can leave a feedback session feeling they have gained from the experience.

Mairead Dillon and Jane Penson are both members of Toastmasters International, a worldwide not-for-profit organisation focused on developing communication and leadership skills

I found this great and very useful article on Forbes written by Joshua Steimle titled, 'The top 3 tips from a LinkedIn Expert' and wanted to share it with my readers. It's contains some dos and don'ts  when trying to build a connection with a possible future business associate.

Image from sitetrail

I’ve been a user and fan of LinkedIn for several years and am currently enjoying reading The Startup of You by LinkedIn co-Founder Reid Hoffman. Although it has its detractors and plenty of room for improvement, LinkedIn has become perhaps the most widely used business tool since email itself. And yet even if it’s used, how many of us use it correctly, or to its full potential? Many people set up a profile, connect with some friends, and then leave it at that. Another class of LinkedIn users are much more active, but perhaps too active, spamming their connections and LinkedIn groups with get-rich-quick schemes or articles, the posting of which is designed more to bring attention to the one doing the posting than to provide any true value to LinkedIn users.

Recently I met Alex Pirouz, a successful entrepreneur and author. In talking with Alex I learned he was featured in the book Getting Your Business LinkedIn, so I asked him to give me his top three LinkedIn tips. Here they are, in Alex’s own words:

1. Value Bank

Connecting and effectively communicating with people through LinkedIn is no different than dealing with people outside of the network. Whether they are a supplier, potential partner or customer you need to build enough value for them to trust you in order for them to grow an interest in your company and therefore your product/service. I call this: Value Bank.

I can’t recall how many times I have accepted a connection invite from someone to then receive an email marketing spiel about who they are, what they can do for me and how much it is going to cost me.  Oh and I forgot to mention that none of this was addressed to me personally, no name at the top of the email.


To be successful on LinkedIn and in business overall you have to add value first. Just because they accepted your connection invite doesn’t mean they are interested in what you have to say, remember this quote: “To be interesting you have to be interested.”

Before you start emailing marketing to your contacts, think of a few ways you could add value to them. For example it may be that within your connections there are about 100 accountants of whom you have recently connected and would like to potentially partner with. Your first email could be a sending a link to a recent article you read/noticed in SMH. This shows you were thinking of him/her. Your second email could be a FREE Ebook you have found that helps accountants generate more business etc.

This will help develop the trust and rapport necessary between your connection so that when you contact them to hold a meeting they not only recognize you but most importantly interested.

2. Connecting with a purpose

Building your connections for the sake of having a large following is not really a sound strategy if you want to effectively grow your business using LinkedIn. Every connection needs to be linked to your goals and objectives in business both now and in the future.

Before growing your network on LinkedIn take a step back and think about some of the goals you would like to achieve within your business over the next year or so. With these goals in mind now think about who you need to connect with in order to help you achieve those goals. For example when I first started using LinkedIn I just launched my business advisory service and given I had no personal brand other then my results in business I knew this was one of the areas I needed to develop.

And as many of you would know one way to build your brand is through PR. With this goal in mind I then connected with over 500 journalist, editors and bloggers online and in a space of a couple of months I managed to get featured in over 40 publications and now write for a few business magazines.


3. Segmenting your connections

I learnt the importance of segmenting your connections the hard way. Within my first 6 months of using LinkedIn I had connected with over 1000 people within 3 different industries: Media, Accounting & Events.

My aim was to use the media contacts to get some PR exposure, Accounting connections to create a few joint venture relationships and connections within the events industry to hopefully get some speaking gigs.

There was just one problem though: All my connections were mixed in with one another, not by choice but by default. You see, little to my knowledge I wasn’t aware that all new connections are automatically tagged under a folder which LinkedIn calls: Untagged.

I knew that in order for me to reach any level of success I would have to personalize my communication and because I could not properly assess who was who quickly within the tags section I had to go through the entire (1000) connections in the untagged folder and re-tag them accordingly.

Whilst it was tedious and frustrating at the best of times it was also very empowering. By the end of the process I knew precisely how many connections I had in each industry, which therefore helped me effectively communicate my message.

Learn from my mistake, before adding even one more connection take one step back and segment your connections so you can take 2 steps forward.

Get Personal And Social With Your Marketing Efforts

The infographic below shows some interesting stats on Social growth.

Image from garetcase.com

5 tips on marketing by Garet Case: 

Social provides us with a platform that makes our audience feel special, feel loved and not feel like they were 1 of 29 Billion people that just got the same email.

1: So, ensure your email is targeted and relevant before pushing send and that the receiver's data is accurate. ‘Mr Do Not Email’ I’m sure would approve.


2: Invest time in researching and then connecting with your customer and prospect base on social channels like Twitter and LinkedIn. Then market to them individually on these platforms. Yes it’s time consuming but just watch the results. Suddenly you will have an engaged audience, you can tweak the content and messages on an individual basis and that will lead to a much more successful campaign.

3: The Facebook Generation are email adverse. 10 years from now the senior decision maker community will be socially genetic. We need to understand this and start building proper social marketing strategies to help us differentiate when this shift change occurs. It’s occurring already by the way…

There really is no excuse not to get personal and social with your marketing efforts.