Sometimes you need to do something different with your day to open your mind to opportunities.
Last week three of our team visited Accountex 2016 - the national accountancy exhibition and conference - at the ExCel centre in London. It was a chance to get some ideas and inspiration for developing our business and to look for additional opportunities to support our clients.
What an amazing and enormous venue the ExCel centre is. But what was surprising was the number of other exhibitions also happening in the same venue on the same days - business, marketing, administration and legal events. An opportunity for all types of business to gather ideas.
None of our team had been to this exhibition before but with a growing practice we were interested to see what new technologies and software were being exhibited which would be useful for us. The directory showed 10 theatres with speakers every hour and with so much choice we had to focus on what would be beneficial for us as a practice.
So each of us went with a plan - one to identify new technologies and software to enhance our bookkeeping offering, another to seek out payroll and auto enrolment software which would work together to simplify the process and the third to get ideas to improve practice management.
We planned in advance the talks we wanted to go to and the stands we wanted to visit so that we made good use of our time. There was so much to choose from we could have walked around blindly and not achieved anything valuable. The talks were useful - some inspirational, some practical - but giving us plenty to think about, and the variety of companies exhibiting enabled us to gather lots of useful information to digest later.
It certainly was an exhausting day giving us plenty to think about and discuss.
So this week the three of us will be sharing the information we gathered with the rest of the team and identifying what new software we might trial over the next couple of months, what new practices we will put in place and what new opportunities we might develop for our clients to benefit from.
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It was great to attend this exhibition with some of the team. They found it interesting, inspiring and motivating and for me it was great to have others to share our findings and discuss opportunities with.
As a business owner you can feel that you are the one who has to come up with the ideas and find solutions to develop the business. But having recently worked towards Investors in People with my team (and achieving it at the first attempt) I know now that my team can have the answers too and their input is valuable to the growth of our business.
