Last week the world celebrated Global Entrepreneurship week.   We went along to an array of events and conferences in London like a big fat sponge absorbing all of the useful tips and tricks from proven successful entrepreneurs.

There were a few key themes that stood out for us from the week which were:

• Social media now plays a huge part in business, driving new client acquisition and providing a new type of effective customer service.
• Small companies can have a big impact on large players, which was demonstrated by Ella Kitchens glorious success in the baby food market, who now have something like 7 of the top 10 selling baby foods in the UK.
• The biggest risk to companies is to not go global. This message was particular strong at Entrepreneur Country Born Global event as you might suspect.  Julie Meyer interviewed the MD of UK Trade and Investments who reeled off stats such as global businesses are 11% more likely to survive and 1/3 more efficient.  The UK Trade and Investments are more active than ever before, now supporting smaller companies and rolling out a peer to peer platform ran by Yell next year.
• The media is counter-productive for business as most news is negative and can put off innovative new companies from getting started.  Both Lara Morgan and Neal Ghandi agreed that there is a need for more positive business related media and until that day they both pay very little attention to what is going on.
• The best time to start a business is in a recession - it teaches you to be more innovative and lean giving you competitive advantage in better times.  As a small business you can also move more quickly adopting new tools and approaches again resulting in competitive advantage.

A few events such as Fresh Business Live and Great British Start Up show were a little disappointing mainly due to same old, same old business event/conference format, which for an entrepreneurial related events isn’t really that appropriate in our view.  We’d like to see more creative and different events next year please #GEW.

All in all though the week was motivating and inspiring and we left with lots of new ideas for our self and our clients.