Love Fridays

As I got in the car tonight to drive home from work I had a smile to myself. At the moment I really love Fridays.

And it’s not for that “weekend” feeling that most people have. I actually enjoy working and often spend some of the weekend working too – although not every weekend and I do have many great weekends off too. No, the reason I love Friday is that at the moment it’s just a great day for me.

It starts with a swim – this morning I did 2.125kms which is a strange distance I know. I did 2 x 1km, then wanted a little cool down. However they are reflooring the side of the pool at the shallow end, so I had to swim an “odd” length to get out.

After the swim I drive to the office to work on VisuallySocial. I split my working week between Joshua PR and VisuallySocial and although Joshua PR takes the vast majority of my time I try to devote every Friday to VisuallySocial. We are trying to establish the business and it’s a really interesting challenge to face and quite different from the Joshua PR stuff.

Not only do I enjoy the work on a Friday, but I get to work with one of my favourite people too. As I said, we’re trying to build the business so it’s important that we sit and chat and work through thoughts and ideas and occasionally issues. But it’s great to work with Lucy and we complement each other very well (we sometimes compliment each other too!).

I may sound a bit sad (and clearly make me sound old), but as I get into the car I then listen to Simon Mayo on Radio 2. There’s something about his Friday request show that is genuinely heart-warming. To top it off, this evening as I was driving home I could feel it getting lighter in the evenings and I could imagine nice, warm summer evenings.

Finally, Fridays are my darts nights. There’s a group of blokes which I managed to join that plays darts every Friday in a local pub. It’s nothing serious and not necessarily a great standard of darts, but it’s good fun and they are nice blokes. I’ve only been playing since just before Xmas and they’re all a bit older than me (and been a group for years), but they’re really welcoming and friendly and I really enjoy my Friday night darts.

So that’s my Friday – and I love it.

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When do you get a PR agency?

Please excuse this post. It’s a little bit self-indulgent from me as this is my response to a conversation I was having on Twitter. I’m not even sure the people I was talking to on Twitter will read it, but here goes…

It started with this tweet.

And so I replied (if you follow the link above you’ll see my responses). But it got me thinking and I realised that I couldn’t say what I wanted to in 140 characters, or even in several multiples of that.

I can completely understand the sentiment behind this – a reporter has a good relationship with a founder and finds them a good source of information (about their own company, but probably about the wider sector too) and suddenly that relationship and that source disappears. We’d all be pissed off about that.

But if you look at it from the founder’s point of view – they’ve just been given a bunch of money to make a step change to their business. The money is meant to make a significant difference and suddenly the founder’s targets, requirements and responsibilities have changed dramatically. In the same way suddenly the day-to-day activities that they were doing at the previous stage are not the same day-to-day activities they need to be doing now. I can imagine that there are lots of changes and of course the money means that they can now hire people (including a PR agency) to do some of those tasks they are leaving behind.

Personally, I don’t think it’s the fact that someone else is doing the task I think it’s the way the whole thing is handled.

Too often an agency will win the business and suddenly a junior will be employed to do the media relations. The journalist goes from speaking to a senior executive that not only knows their business inside out, but also knows the sector intimately, to speaking to a junior PR exec that isn’t quite sure of their own name (or that’s how it seems). If that is coupled with the fact that the founder hasn’t done a proper handover and highlighted the journalists they already know well (possibly even sending a personal email to a few) then that is bound to piss people off and completely justifiably.

In summary: of course the founder in this situation should get people to help take over some of the workload (that’s what the money is partly for), but pick a PR agency with senior people that know what they’re doing and give them a proper handover.

– – –

Of course I would say all of this – I run a PR agency. But I’m also the founder of a start-up.

Filming done

The other day I wrote this:

I don’t often tweet work stuff, but I’m going to be busy over the next few days with an interesting and exciting project that I wanted to share. And I mainly wanted to share it because if you’re a small business in London, Nottingham or Edinburgh then it might be really valuable to you too (obviously you won’t actually be a business, but you know what I mean).

Over the next three days VisuallySocial is doing a roadshow in those three cities, filming small businesses on behalf of Bizcrowd. The idea is that the businesses will then be showcased across all of Bizcrowd’s channels (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, website etc) in the run up to Small Business Saturday, which is on the 7th December.

You can read more details (including filming locations) here.

If you’re in a small business and you’re around in those locations this week, then come along and be filmed.

– – –

I thought I should update you and let you know how it went – which was amazingly well! If you follow @Bizcrowd on Twitter then you’ll start to see some of the videos over the next few days. Videos like this one of Kate from Grow Up:

London, Nottingham, Edinburgh businesses

I don’t often tweet work stuff, but I’m going to be busy over the next few days with an interesting and exciting project that I wanted to share. And I mainly wanted to share it because if you’re a small business in London, Nottingham or Edinburgh then it might be really valuable to you too (obviously you won’t actually be a business, but you know what I mean).

Over the next three days VisuallySocial is doing a roadshow in those three cities, filming small businesses on behalf of Bizcrowd. The idea is that the businesses will then be showcased across all of Bizcrowd’s channels (Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, website etc) in the run up to Small Business Saturday, which is on the 7th December.

You can read more details (including filming locations) here.

If you’re in a small business and you’re around in those locations this week, then come along and be filmed.

Washout weekend, woeful Wednesday

I don’t want you to feel sorry for me, but I work hard at my job. It’s not so much the hours as the intensity and sometimes it can just make me feel run down and unable to train and that’s what happened this weekend.

It started on Thursday which was a very intense day (don’t get me wrong it was great too – a lot of very exciting meetings about this). Thursday is also on the training plan as a gym night. The plan is to do a bit of cardio (bike and treadmill), but have a good weights session between those two to work on the back and shoulders. However, I got to the gym and could only manage 10 minutes on the bike. I just felt weak, had a killer headache and felt sick – not a good recipe for training. So I went home.

A good night’s sleep and again on Friday and I thought I’d be fine for my Saturday session – which is the same as Thursday plus a swim to finish it off.

Friday night didn’t turn out to be a good night as the little one woke up at 2am feeling ill, but I got everything ready as per usual on Saturday morning. I was just about to head off when I sat on the bed for a couple of minutes and nearly couldn’t get up – again not a good recipe for a training session. So Saturday got cancelled. The same thing happened on Monday morning as I was about to go out for my big swim. I realised I could go and try, but I’d either fail miserably or knock myself out for the whole week ahead – again with work not something I can risk. So another cancellation.

I did manage a very gentle mile on Monday evening, but that brings us to this morning.

I thought I was feeling better so I set off to replace Monday’s big swim with my threshold training routine. It was tough.

I managed the 100s in about 1:50 (between 1:47 and 1:52), but the 200s were a real struggle and in fact I left three of them out there.

Woeful… but possibly understandable and certainly better than a cancellation.

3,000m including warm up and cool down.

Visual content for social media

I don’t use this blog to write about work stuff very often, but I’m doing something really exciting at the moment that I wanted to share. (Actually I do lots of exciting things – like generate media coverage for this very cool solar powered boat.)

Anyway, this exciting project is all about visual content for social media – you can see more here. We’re starting out with an event in Nottingham – if you’re East Mids based, you should try to come along – you can see a quick video with more details on YouTube. And after the event there’ll be a lot more stuff to follow.

Watch this space – or preferably this one!