scrambledmindsMixed up thoughts on the web world, photography and life.

A piece of shameless self-promotion. I’ve finally managed to take the leap and launch my own business – One Zero One. It’s taken some time and I’ve still got a long way to go but it’s exciting (and challenging) times.

Having come from the corporate world, which has more than it’s fair share of boring seminars and dry training, there was only one course over the years that I can remember ever being engaging, entertaining AND educational.   Can you remember one of those?

As part of my new venture to educate businesses about the web and digital technology, I wanted to learn how to provide great, engaging training so I went looking for the training the “Leopard Skin Lady” who ran that training to see if she could help.

The Leopard Skin Lady is one Donna McGeorge.  Speaker, facilitator and trainer and she runs Passion, Energy and Performance.

As a result of getting in contact with Donna I attended her Beyond Cert IV training course (a train the trainer event).  What can I say?  It was a great three days.  I went in with a very good measure of bad training and a very poor understanding of the techniques and tools to run great training and came out enlightened.  I was presented with a whole suite of tips, tricks, tools, techniques and “secrets” that I can now practically apply to develop great training.  From structuring a plan for effective learning, engaging your audience to dealing with troublesome participants.  As a matter of fact, the things I learnt can be applied to any sort of training, presenting, facilitation or public speaking.  Even creative writing.  Even Sales!

So, if you’re interested in running any training, I can’t recommend highly enough the Beyond Cert IV course run by Donna McGeorge from Passion, Energy and Performance.

Have any of your heard of The Flight of the Conchords?  They’re a comedy musical duo from New Zealand with a fantastic album and TV series.  If you haven’t, you should check them out.  Here’s some stuff on youtube.  They’re hilarious!

I’ve found some peculiar inspiration from their song Business Time (linked above).  I’ll let you listen to it, but towards the end of the song is a lyric along the lines of  “… and you know what time it is when I’m down to just my socks?  It’s business time!  That’s why they call them business socks…”.  Genius.

Apart from being genius, and referring to something else entirely, this line holds some truth for me in my career.  After quite a few years in the Enterprise IT space, I’ve been thinking for some time that I needed to do something else.  I wanted a change.  I needed to strip back to my socks and start again.  I came to the conclusion that it was time to merge my love of technology, particularly the web, and my love of helping people.

Great linkage, huh?  But wait!  There’s more!

As a result I’ve decided to start my own thing providing training and advice to businesses about how to bring the power of the web to benefit their business.  I get to talk about the web.  I get to meet cool people.  I get to help said cool people.  Enough?  I think so.

It’s time to give it a go.  I’ll be at least able to say I’ve tried!  So, as the song says – It’s Business Time.

ps. When I launch, which will be very soon, it’ll be called 101 (i.e. one zero one).  The first offering will be training for virtualising your business to work from anywhere, opening the doors of the web through search and getting your goods in an online store.  What do you think?

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