10 fabulous things that have happened in the last 4 years

#teamlovely has been celebrating Learning Pool’s 4^th birthday for the past week or so – just look at that cake in the photo. There’ve been many times in the last 4 years that the achievement of this milestone seemed like a tall order – but resilience has always been the order of the day round here so we’ve just kept our heads down and carried on plugging away. A rather frightening statistic is that 75% of new start ups have crashed & burned by the end of Year 3 – so it’s good to be in a successful minority, especially during the current global economic recession. As we reach the end of our celebrations, this has got me thinking about the highlights of the last 4 years for Paul & me (this blog is a bit selfish for which I apologise now). Here they are in no particular order:

1. Getting to see Bill Clinton in Derry this week – that was cool & so was he (disappointed you didn’t mention “digital” Bill – ah well)

2. In the early days, making a snap decision to go ahead & build Modern Councillor whilst crossing the West End of London in a taxi – it’s been a roaring success ever since

3. Also in the early days, receiving a Letter of Offer from one of the Belfast VCs and turning it down – twice!

4. Blagging our way in to spending 45 minutes with a Director of Education in Capitol Hill & listening to his sage advice

5. Reaching the final of the 2008 All Ireland Seedcorn competition and having a great night out with our team

6. Following on from No 5, our team meeting Jerry Kennelly (founder of Stockbyte that was sold to Getty Images in 2006 for $135m) at the Seedcorn awards party and having him tell us we have a great company, to keep doing what we’re doing & not to take any investment (thanks Jerry!)

7. Holding a launch party in Johannesburg in Nov 2009 at the UK Trade Commissioner’s residence and having lovely Baroness Glenys Kinnock, Minister for Africa, as our keynote speaker

8. Being overjoyed when Donald Clark approached us and subsequently offered to join our board as a non exec director (great to have you on board Donald – #teamlovely loves you to bits)

9. Welcoming 200 people to our annual conference at London’s Royal Mint on 12 May 2010 and receiving their fabulous feedback

10. Being one of Deloitte’s Rising Stars at the end of 2009

11. Knowing that we’re well on our way to building the biggest & best public sector online learning community in the world

OK – so there were 11…here’s to the next batch!

To hug or not to hug…

I’m often surprised and pleased by the number of people that hug me the first time I ever meet them; some people even hug me as soon as we’re introduced. I don’t know why this happens although I must say I’m pleased it does. In my opinion, hugging shows you feel close to other people in a non-threatening & not too intimate way & it feels nice. Others in the Learning Pool team have been known to push me forward when there’s hugging to be done.

I’m in Scotland this weekend taking a couple of days out after a busy month of getting Learning Pool’s new Glasgow office up & running. Dave, Breda & I hosted a breakfast briefing in Edinburgh on Thursday at which one of Learning Pool’s non execs, Donald Clark was speaking. Donald is pretty much always controversial (read his blog athttp://donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com/ to see for yourself if you don’t believe me), especially when he’s talking to people that train others using traditional means – and he didn’t disappoint on Thursday. At the end of the morning, I could see Sheila Fleetwood (pictured with me above) making a bee-line for me. She’d been engaging in some lively banter with Donald over the course of his session & I must admit I thought for one second she was coming over to give me a slap. Instead, to my delight, she hugged me & thanked me for such an interesting & thought provoking morning. Phew!

A couple of months ago, Dave & I were in Exeter for Likeminds (gosh – was that really February?) and we had a fab night out with some of our local guvvie pals we don’t see anywhere near often enough. That night I had a great conversation with Martin Howitt & Bill Wells about hugging and how much we like to do it. The three of us decided that one of the measures of how well Learning Pool is doing could be the number of customer hugs I receive every month – admittedly a rather unusual business metric. So far it seems to work.

Next week is the company’s annual birthday bash (hard to believe but we’re 4 years old) – we’re having a party on HMS President & I expect to get a lot of hugs that day – tell you what – I’ll count them & post the number back up here as a comment next week.

Conclusion – hugging is good with your business associates – keep doing it & keep those hugs coming for me!

Similarities between the Learning Pool community and the “Deadheads”…

There was a great article a couple of months back in the Sunday Times magazine. It made comparisons between the Grateful Dead (Californian band headed up by the late Jerry Garcia, prolific creators, performers, LSD fuelled, very personal relationship with their fans – known as the Deadheads) and the Apple Corporation (personified best in their use of the “Think Different” slogan). The basic premise of the article was that the Grateful Dead were ahead of their time in the way that they interacted with & involved their fans in the running of the band. It was an innovative business model that was the exact opposite of what every other band did.

This got me thinking about the way Learning Pool interacts with its own community – and yes – there’s a lot of similarities, with the exception of consumption of large amounts of LSD of course. Here are 5 of them:

1. The Grateful Dead allowed & even encouraged the Deadheads to tape their concerts and share the tapes with each other – as long as no money changed hands; Learning Pool encourages its community to use our authoring tool to create content and share it via the community – as long as no money changes hands. This is fundamentally different from how other e-learning companies operate. Even those that facilitate “sharing” make some money out of that process somewhere along the way.

2. The Grateful Dead’s operating model flew in the face of how bands did things back in the 1970s and 80s; Learning Pool bucked the trend in e-learning by launching a learning management system in 2008 that was built on open source technology and priced to disrupt the market. It has since been adopted right across local government making it the LMS of choice and the clear market leader by a long chalk.

3. Barry Barnes, professor of leadership in the School of Business & Entrepreneurship in Florida describes the Grateful Dead’s energy as “dynamic synchronicity”; I like to think that this description could be equally well applied to the way that Learning Pool builds products hand in hand with its community and steering group, encouraging community members to steer our direction and shape the way we do things is second nature and allows for dynamic interaction.

4. Continual innovation & creativity meant the Grateful Dead had a repertoire of over 150 active songs covering many musical genres and this in turn meant that none of their 2,300 or so live concerts were ever the same; the way Learning Pool builds content and accesses subject matter expertise with its members means that we have a huge catalogue of well over 200 up-to-date & constantly refreshed e-learning courses for our community to use.

5. The Grateful Dead understood that in an information economy, the key relationship is between familiarity & value (not scarcity & value as in the old supply & demand model) and for the band this manifested itself in the incredibly close almost mystical relationship that existed between the band and the Deadheads – in business parlance they brought passion to the customer relationship; Learning Pool has built an incredibly personal relationship with its growing community (tens of thousands of local government officers, elected members and school governors use our learning products) and our customers frequently tell us we are more like partners than suppliers or that we’re part of the fabric of local government – and that makes us both proud and happy.

In true Irish fashion I’m going to leave you with a local story about the Grateful Dead, as told to me by Raphoe man & famous fiddler, Martin McGinley. Jerry Garcia was in Co Donegal whilst recovering from his triple heart bypass operation & happened upon the Bridge Bar in Ramelton, a well known & popular music venue. He noticed that the McPeake band from Belfast were playing that night & returned later for the gig. He was spotted drinking tumblers of Jack Daniels at the bar by local men James McDaid & John McIvor. The boys sidled over for a chat & established that it was indeed really Jerry Garcia and with mounting excitement they asked him if he would get up and play a few numbers. Jerry said that he would – but the McPeake band refused to allow it – saying they didn’t permit anyone to perform with them on stage. Hard to know what to say sometimes, isn’t it?

Image of Jerry Garcia used above attributed to Jay Blakesberg with grateful thanks

Two Heads are Better than One – 10 pros of having a business partner

The photo above is me with my own business partner, Paul McElvaney. It was taken a couple of summers ago & we’re sitting on top of the world – ok – it’s the Giant’s Causeway but it feels like the top of the world when you’re there…it’s a much better photo of Paul than it is of me but I love it nevertheless because we’re both laughing and the sun’s out.

This week we were over at Belfast’s Start VI talking to some early stage entrepreneurs about their plans for their new businesses. This got me thinking about the whole business partner debate – to have or have not – so here are my thoughts on this subject:

1. If you’re dreaming big with your start-up you should think about finding a business partner – unless you already have proof that you’re superhuman. Our business, Learning Pool, has grown from nothing to 50 people and £3.5m turnover in 4 years. That’s a lot of work whichever way you look at it.

2. Partners should have complementary business skills – it’s the 2 + 2 = 5 effect. In our case, Paul’s far more technical than me & has a project management background whereas I come from an accountancy & legal background. Having said that – both of us are immersed in our chosen sector and we can both sell – that bit’s important.

3. Two people means you have more ideas for brainstorming and (at least) two views on opportunities and risks; you can also learn a lot from each other.

4. If there are two of you, chances are you have a much bigger network than one person and you just know more stuff and have more experience to draw on between you – so you can make better decisions than a person trying to figure it out on their own. There are many decisions that Paul & I make every day on our own but there’s also a lot that we decide upon jointly via a process of debate & brainstorming between us – it’s hard to understand unless you try it…and you have to be prepared to not always get your own way.

5. It makes the business more “formal” in those early days – if you were by yourself chances are you wouldn’t bother with monthly management accounts or you’d be more lax over expenses or you wouldn’t write so much down. This early discipline stands you in good stead when you start to scale.

6. Two people can cover a helluva lot more ground – business requires a lot of travel, pitching, attendance at events, socialising, networking. It also makes it easier to get away for a bit of a break.

7. Your partner’s there for the bad times – when you don’t win a contract you’ve pitched hard for or when the bank says No – but also for the good times – and it’s great to have someone to share with. A new business is like a rollercoaster ride and having a partner to bounce off & share stuff with & who picks you up when you’re down & vice versa flattens out some of those crazy peaks and troughs.

8. Most entrepreneurs are control freaks so it can be hard working so closely with another person, especially at first. They do say that you have to work at your business partnership like you would a marriage and that’s true. You have to be prepared to be completely open and honest in a way that you will not be used to – not even with your family or your spouse/partner. Your business partner will know more about your personal finances and even your personality traits than your close friends or family do. You will have seen each other make unpalatable decisions and behave ruthlessly and you will have exposed that darker side of your nature to each other. Once you’ve accepted this it is slightly comforting.

9. There’s some practical reasons when you’re starting out – like having more working capital as there are two of you or having more places to get hold of start-up capital.

10. Having a partner makes you more resilient and it makes you work harder – as you have someone else who’s opinion you care about to prove yourself to.

My own experience of this has been incredibly positive. Paul & I work well together. We both work hard and put an equal amount into our business in terms of effort and expertise – that’s important too – I don’t know how it would work if one partner felt short changed by the other but I guess it would be uncomfortable and unsustainable. We have a lot of laughs along the way and there’s a great deal of healthy competitiveness and “sport”. There have been some really bad days on the journey but there have also been some amazing highs and I wouldn’t change things for the world. I’ve ended up with a friend that I would trust with my life without any hesitation. And that’s a big deal.

I’ll leave you with a quote from John D Rockefeller “A friendship founded on business is a good deal better than a business founded on friendship”. Bit of food for thought in there. I look forward to your comments friends & readers.

Mark Nagurski, Derry’s own Martha Lane Fox – 10 things the two Digital Champions have in common

This week Mark Nagurski started his new role as Derry’s first Digital Champion. There’s been a lot of interest in and around the appointment and it’s become a whole lot bigger & more prestigious since Derry’s win of the UK City of Culture 2013 competition. “Digital Champion” is a job title we’d never heard of 5 years ago but it’s becoming increasingly popular. Other job titles of a similar ilk and in the same type of space would be Brian Halligan’s appointment as “entrepreneur in residence” at MIT or the appointment of Lloyd Davis as “social artist in residence” at the University of London’s Centre for Creative Collaboration.

Mark’s remit is to spend the next two years promoting the burgeoning creative digital sector in the North West of Ireland.

Now I realise that Martha’s job as the UK’s Digital Champion is on a much bigger scale than Mark’s but I thought it would be a bit of fun to spot some similarities between them beyond their shared job title – so here goes:

1. They are both internet entrepreneurs and have been deeply steeped in the internet and what it means for business and society forever

2. Neither of them studied a technology subject at university – Martha studied Ancient & Modern History at Oxford and Mark studied International Relations at the LSE

3. They were both born in the 1970s so they’re both still “young”

4. They’ll both talk to anyone

5. They both write extremely well & are articulate in conversation

6. They love starting things and are serial entrepreneurs

7. Neither of them have sisters

8. They are both grafters and will work their backsides off for a cause they believe in

9. They believe in themselves and their own abilities

10. They know what they’re talking about and command respect from their audiences and peers.

Good luck in the new role Mark. I for one am delighted with your appointment and I can’t wait to see the success and opportunity you’ll bring to Derry and the NW in the next couple of years.

A Room with a View…is it always worth it?

Rather unusually for someone that’s been on the planet as long as I have, I’m lucky enough to have never spent a single night in hospital. It’s been an experience therefore to have spent the last 3 days at the bedside of a very sick relative in the quite odd Hopitaux du Pays du Mont-Blanc in the town of Sallanches near the French resort of Chamonix. It’s not like I imagined hospitals to be. It’s modern & very clean. It’s quiet & eerily empty. There are no wards, just rooms painted bright yellow with one or two people in them. Every room has a stunning view – either out onto the Big Mountain itself or one of the other minor peaks. Do people recover quicker when they’re in a room with a view? Maybe.

Twice a day a black helicopter lands on the roof bringing in an emergency – either a holidaymaker that’s damaged themselves whilst indulging in one of the many, many extreme sports on offer in this part of the world – or transporting someone from one of the remote villages. Yesterday we watched an elderly gentleman in his neatly buttoned overcoat walk from the helicopter.

I feel as though I’ve slipped into a parallel universe in only three days. My day to day life at Learning Pool seems like a distant dream. I’m either in the hospital feeling helpless or I’m outside reading Haruki Murakami’s surreal “Wind-Up Bird Chronicle”, drinking coffee out of a machine and wondering why people that are sick enough to be in hospital think it’s a good idea to go outside & smoke, even when that means dragging their drips & tubes with them.

Human life – it’s a beautiful and fragile thing – we should remember that and try to be a bit nicer to each other for the short time we spend on earth.

He made me what I am…

…even though he will deny it! Dr Bryan Keating (pictured above at Learning Pool’s office earlier this month) is one of the reasons I moved from London to Northern Ireland, 10 years ago at the end of this month. I left my safe job as FD of CIPFA’s commercial subsidiary IPF. I’d worked at CIPFA for what felt like 100 years or more. It was cosy & familiar and I’d recruited and collected a high performing team around me over the years. As an organisation, we hit all our targets & were able to predict with a high degree of certainty what we’d be doing for the next 3 – 5 years. Life was easy.

What could be stranger than leaving that environment to become a dotcommer – working for one of Belfast’s high tech VC funded start-ups? Drenched in uncertainty, constantly seeking funding, moving the goalposts every day, handling our tricky VCs, managing our quota of prima donnas (every tech start-up has them!)…Bryan was the person that calmly showed me how to deal with all of that & more. Take my hand & walk into the abyss – sometimes that’s what you have to do.

He coached & mentored me when I needed it with sensible advice and his practical and so friendly way. Bryan shared with me his wisdom and told me his stories – the kinds of stories every fledgling entrepreneur needs to listen to and hear. We had a few adventures & met some great people (and some not so great people) along the way, burned the midnight oil when we needed to and we had a lot of laughs.

Bryan gave me confidence and encouraged me to go on & become an entrepreneur myself and for that I will be forever grateful to him. It hasn’t always been an easy journey but it has been challenging and fulfilling. If I hadn’t met him when I did, that would definitely not have happened for me. He is a great man and over the years I have learned so much from him. Even now, when I have an important decision to make, I calmly ask myself what Bryan would suggest – and I’m able to think it through in my head. I usually carry a few of his crazy diagrams in my handbag, scribbled quickly on a napkin or the nearest scrap of paper as he explains something, and I look at them from time to time & reflect on the advice he’s given to me. I carry some of his words in my head and repeat them to myself from time to time like a mantra. I find myself saying some of those same things now to my own young team.

Bryan – thank you for everything that you’ve done for me and for everything you’ve done for the hundreds of other start-ups and entrepreneurs that you’ve helped and encouraged along the way – we appreciate you and I don’t know where we’d be without you!

When size really matters…

Travelling back to Belfast from East Midlands airport always provides a good bit of sport. Why? Watching the BMI Baby Baggage Police humiliating traveller after traveller of course. Making them cram their bags into the cage one at a time under scrutiny. Penalty if you can’t force your bag in there – £30.

This results in the following behaviours that I’ve witnessed in the past few weeks:

Ø grown men in suits crawling around on the dirty floor with their clothes strewn everywhere trying to repack their bag more tidily whilst everyone else in the queue climbs over them;

Ø pensioners who probably rarely travel being terrorised into parting with their hard-earned cash (despite our loud barracking of the airline staff);

Ø pleading and wheedling by all sorts of people, yours truly included.

Today we watched the airline delay a flight to Edinburgh whilst a man tried & tried to repack his bag in a different way – it was just the wrong shape…

BMI Baby has a less generous hand baggage measuring system than anyone else – and those extra centimetres count when the pressure’s on. This means that if you travel a lot, like the Learning Pool team does backwards & forwards from our Northern Ireland HQ, it inevitably catches you out. It’s that sinking feeling when you remember you’re on a BMI Baby flight (see McElvaney’s face in the pic above).

When that happens, there’s only one thing for it – head to duty free, buy something & ask the person in there for an extra big bag. Then unload what you can from your case into it – you’re allowed to take on an additional bag if you bought it after clearing security. Some of the Poolies have even started carrying empty duty free bags with them – different ones dependent on the airport they’re using. As Paul always says – Learning Pool – using innovative ways to keep the cost of your subscription low.

Remember that the next time you see one of the Learning Pool team with a duty free bag – that’s all part of our commitment to customer care!

Where would we be without our mums?

And here’s mine – pictured last August with my sister’s two kids on the train from Greenock to Glasgow. It was her birthday & we’d been to Port Glasgow in the pouring rain to try & find the street she was born in…needless to say it’s long gone, flattened by the savage bombings that part of Scotland got in WWII.

My mum tells a fabulous story about the breakout of the war. Her own grandmother & her great aunt were visiting Scotland when the war broke out. Someone had to be responsible for escorting them back to Donegal by ferry and then train. They lived on top of a remote mountain, weren’t used to travel & neither of them could read. There wasn’t anyone else to send so my mum was given the job. She was 10 years old at the time.

She managed well although the train stopped at every hole in the hedge and at each one, the great aunt asked “Are we there yet?” She says she was quite relieved when her uncle joined the train in Omagh & took over responsibility for the rest of the trip and getting the elderly pair delivered safely home. Can anyone today imagine putting a 10 year old in charge of something like that!

That story sums my mum up. She’s fiercely independent & incredibly resilient. She’s always avoided allowing her life to slip into comfortable grooves and she claims “there’s no such word as can’t”. And I guess some of that’s rubbed off because as we all know, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree – and for that I thank my lucky stars every day. Thanks Mum J

Happiness is a new Fig…

I know this blog strictly speaking is about people I meet along the way, but I spend so much time in my car that I’ve given it a personality all of its own. A number of you have asked to see photos of the new Fig – so here it is in all its glory. What a great little car. I had my last Fig for 6 years and during that time, any of you that visited with Learning Pool in Northern Ireland have probably been in it, even some of you that are rather tall (thinking of Donald Clark!). I’ve also met hundreds of people that I wouldn’t otherwise have talked to because they’ve engaged me in conversation about my Fig whenever I stop for more than a couple of seconds.

Can’t say the same for the rather dull hire car I’ve been driving for the past 6 weeks. Indeed my god-daughter commented rather wryly the first day we were out together in the hire car that we hadn’t been photographed or videoed once.

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