We had another patient lined up to see the Doc in January, but unfortunately, she was ill at the last minute. Yes, I know, ‘to ill to go to the Doctor’ – ironic, isn’t it?; but true.

So, in the tradition of live radio, we thought on our feet, turned on a sixpence – and employed every other cliché we cold think of – and decided to take a general lok at what makes a strong, healthy brand.

All my training and instincts tell me that good shows need preparation; careful planning – but just occasionally, something which you pull together at the last minute really works. It has a spontaneity about it. You wonder how the hell it all comes together so quickly – but it does – and it’s a great feeling! A lot of it, I have to say, is down to having a guest who really knows their stuff.

The conversation Ivan and I had (which we’d only planned in very general terms, in reception before going on air – yes, really!), ranged from baby buggies to the link between Cocacola and Santa Claus! I won’t tell you any more because I’m aiming to get the show online asap. I’ll let you know when that happens.

This afternoon, I start another new, occasional series: ‘Where do I start?’, with Paul Smalley of Startup Revolution.

As always, you can catch the show at 3PM on Gateway 97.8 if you’re in the area, or listen anywhere at gateway978.com – and if you have any feedback, or any ideas for possible one-off shows or a series, get in touch.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently because I’ve made major changes, at work and outside. On the work front, there was the rebrand a few weeks ago – the best thing I ever did, incidentally, but quite a scary prospect beforehand.

Personally, I’ve just changed what I drive. No, I’m not talking about swapping a Ford for a Mercedes. I’ve just decided that after twenty-five years of driving Labradors (guide dogs), it’s time to switch to a long cane. What’s the difference? Well, it’s like driving an automatic for years, then suddenly moving to a manual gear box. When you drive an automatic, you still have to know where you’re going and pay attention to what you’re doing and to other road-users etc (as you do with a dog), but there are things you don’t have to worry about. Behind the wheel of a manual car – and behind a long cane – you’re responsible for absolutely everything! Right now I feel I should have L-plates – but this time, I’ll make it work. I’ve tried before and given up – because I didn’t have the motivation to make it work with a cane. This time, for reasons I won’t bore you with, I really want and need to make it happen – so I will.

Coming back to business, I’ve just started reading ‘Fusion: the new way of marketing’ by David Miles and David Taylor. The book is, in a very small nutshell, all about how, whether we like it or not (and those of us over a certain age may like it slightly less than our younger counterparts), our websites must now be at the heart of our marketing and social media has to be a main artery through the body of that marketing.

Last Thursday, at the CEWE conference, organized by the University of East London, I met members of the next generation of entrepreneurs, including two new graduates whose dissertations were business plans. We’re now following each other on Twitter. For them, the need to use Twitter, Facebook etc to promote their new business is as obvious as it was to my generation that we needed a website, or to the previous that they needed to produce leaflets.

Plenty of us who are a little older are getting into social media, of course – it hasn’t been the preserve of teens and techies for some time – but we need to get to grips with using it intelligently, strategically. Without giving too much away, if you’re around my age, you have at least twenty years of working life to go – so, like me, you’re way too young to get left behind.

On that note, I’m off to tweet about this post – and put it on Linkedin … and Facebook … and the website … and …….

There was a time when I thought that having a family and setting up and running a business were complete opposites. I’ve since realised how wrong I was. They have more in common than I would ever have thought. Here are fifteen examples – to be going on with…

1 – Conception – be it the beginning of a business concept or of a new human life, it might be something you’ve been trying for for ages, or it can happen out of the blue; it can be a wonderful moment, or a non-event; but even if it’s the last thing on your mind and indistinguishable at the time from plenty of similar moments, one thing is sure – you’ll realise the significance of this one before too long!

2 – Pregnancy – the period between ‘conception’ and ‘birth’, when the seed of the original idea is blossoming into a fully fledged concept, you can find yourself on a rollercoaster ride. Sometimes you’re excited and can’t wait for the ‘birth’ – and sometimes you wonder ‘who’s damn fool idea was this?!‘

3 – The birth – bearing a baby business is considerably less physically painful than delivering a baby human (for us girls anyway!) – but it can hurt like hell in other ways, including financially – and the bad news for you boys is, if it’s your business, you can’t get your partner to go through the agony for you! The most they can do is hold your hand and mop your fevered brow. For a woman, the big advantage of making a business with your partner, as against making a little person, is that you both really do go through the birth together – on equal terms.

Once it’s here, your brand new business is likely to take over your life. Before it was born, you might have made bold statements about how it was going to have to fit in with you, not the other way around – but, trust me, as young as it is, it has other ideas…

For it to thrive, it needs:

4 – Investment – even before it’s born, there are expenses. You can keep them to a minimum – but if cash is really tight, you’d better start calling in favours and blagging freebies!

5 – Food – and guess what? It’s a fussy little bugger – it will only eat money. Obviously, you can’t pick that up in the Sainsburys baby aisle – even Waitrose don’t sell it! No, the only source of this particular baby food is sales and marketing.

6 – To be kept clean – you have to stay on top of the admin – and the more the baby eats, the more it, er, generates. Neglect it and you end up with one hell of a nappy to change! The good news is that there are options which allow you to outsource the whole nappy thing – from changing to disposal. You can do the same thing with human babies, of course. It’s called ‘employing a nanny’ – and it’s expensive! The commercial equivalent is a lot more affordable.

7 – Clothes – if this child is going to be seen in public, it must be properly dressed. The branding has to be right – but be warned: just like a human baby, a business grows out of its clothes. It doesn’t happen as fast – which is just as well, because a new logo generally costs several times more than a new pair of kids’ shoes. – but just bear in mind that what fits your newborn probably won’t work for your toddler – and may well look ridiculous on your adolescent.

8 – Discipline – like any child, it needs boundaries – so firm, consistent management is a must.

9 – Nurturing – at the beginning, a young business needs a lot of input to develop it. Physical growth – increased turnover, comfortable profits and healthy cash flow – are all fantastic signs – like the steady weight gain of a new baby; but there’s more to growth than getting bigger. There’s also getting stronger, bolder, wiser and sharper – and all that takes good strategic development. That doesn’t stop as the business grows up – it just changes – like the transition from teaching your baby shapes and colours, to helping your pre-teen son or daughter with their unintelligible maths homework!

10 – Other people – it’s possible to be a single parent of a business, but it’s hard work going it alone. It’s much easier to have someone to share the highs and lows and help make the big decisions. If you do decide to fly solo, you will need a strong support network. Friends and family are great, but best of all are other people in a similar position – especially if their ’kids’ are a bit older than yours and they’ve already met and overcome some of the challenges you’re likely to have to deal with. Also, if you try to bring up your business in splendid isolation, it’ll end up detached from the real world and unable to function in it. Yes, really – social interaction is as important for a commercial child as it is for the human equivalent!

11 – Guidance – especially as your infant gets bigger and more adventurous, you need to be several steps ahead – with eyes in some unusual parts of your anatomy! – to stop it getting into trouble, and to help it discover what it‘s capable of – so some planning is essential. That said, try not to fall into the pushy or over-protective parent trap, of wanting to plan out your child’s life down to the last detail. Be prepared for the fact that, whatever expectations you may have when it arrives, it might well confound them and grow up to be something completely different. Like any new parent, you’ll probably want to maintain absolute control, to protect it from the big, bad world for as long as possible; but we all have to go out into that world at some point – and just as relatives, friends, the neighbourhood you live in, schools and so on help to shape a growing child, , , outside influences like changing consumer behaviour, new technology, and changes in the economic climate will have an impact on what your growing business becomes. As long as it grows up to fullfill its potential – whatever that potential may be – that’s all that really matters.

12 – Tolerance – mistakes will happen. To begin with, the buck starts and stops with you. Later, as your business takes on more of a life of its own, there are likely to be other people in the equation, such as staff. Although the ultimate responsibility is still yours I’m afraid! What matters is that everyone knows that mistakes have consequences – and that they’re turned into a learning experience for all concerned.

13 – Realism – when your baby wakes you up in the middle of the night demanding to be fed (if you don’t get those nights when you’re wrestling with where to find more customers, how to pay a bill etc, I’d love to know your secret!), you might think: ‘Never mind. In a few years, all this will be different’. Don’t kid yourself! When a baby grows into a toddler, the toddler grows into a schoolchild, the schoolchild becomes a teenager – and even when that teenager becomes a young adult – it doesn’t challenge its parents less – the challenges just change. It’s no different when you’re bringing up a business.

14 – Time – if you can’t be there in person, you need to make sure that someone else is and that they’re capable of putting the time in – because without that, nothing else can happen. The downside of having someone else look after your child for long periods is, of course, that whilst your name is on the birth certificate and your offspring shares your DNA, because it was born of your original idea and you worked to establish it, the closest longterm bond will be with the primary carer. They will become the face of the business – and the one who will really be due the lion’s share of the credit for its success.

15 – Love – if you don’t love what you do, or what you’re thinking of doing, with a passion, don’t do it – because you won’t give it all the other things I’ve talked about, with the consistency and in the quantities it needs to survive and thrive. It needs you to be there when it needs you, and not just when you want to. It will demand sacrifices from you – in my own experience, nothing prepared me for how much it would ask of me!

So why do it? Because next to bringing another human being into the world and raising them to make a real contribution, raising your own business is one of the most rewarding things you can do.

Also, unlike a flesh and blood child, it‘ll never ask to borrow the car – and if you play your cards right and put the work in, it will eventually keep you in the style to which you‘d like to become accustomed!

Like human children, you can of course have more than one – but if you’re tempted to ’bring them up together’, be careful. It’s a great idea in theory – and extremely tough going in practice.

Speaking of which – sorry! Got to run now – my pre-schooler is asking questions and the baby is screaming to be fed!

The event, which took place at the Park Inn, Thurrock (South-East Essex), was organized by Caroline Thomas of Sales Scene. Caroline’s first promotional email billed the session as ‘A different kind of networking’. Well, every networking group that ever gathered thought it was ‘different’, didn’t it?! ‘So, what’s new about this one?’ I wondered.

I’m always on the look-out for networking events – different or otherwise, though, and the subject heading told me this one was close to home. So although I didn’t open the email immediately, I didn’t delete it.

When a reminder came through, I was having a bit of an in-box tidy-up, so thought I’d better make my mind up whether to open or delete. I opened – and was curious.

It was an invitation to ‘Thurrock Jelly’ which was apparently free – but what the hell was business ‘jelly’?

I found out more when I interviewed Caroline for my radio show a couple of weeks ago – but it only really made sense when I saw it in practice.

To call it ‘networking’ at all is misleading really – it’s actually about co-working. Yes, some organic networking went on (which I always think is the best kind) – I’ve got two meetings tomorrow as a result; but the emphasis isn’t on sales and marketing, making contacts and swapping cards. It’s all about people who spend a substantial part of their working lives alone, getting together to work on their own projects in a more normal office environment, maybe to trade skills and ideas but certainly to break the day-to-day tedium of only having the computer to swear at!

So why is it called ‘jellying’? I thought it was something to do with everyone ‘gelling’ together – but, no. Apparently, the two IT freelancers who came up with the concept in New York in 2006 were eating jelly beans when inspiration struck… Let’s just be thankful they weren’t enjoying foot-long hotdogs…!

There are now several regular sessions in the UK and across Europe. They’re all different, but they have three things in common:

1 – Organizing the event itself is not a business;
2 – Jelly organizers don’t make money out of it (although as I saw for myself, they certainly have to work!); and
3 – Jellying is free.

Thurrock’s next event will be in June or July (dates to be confirmed) – and we hope next time to see some real jelly! If you spend too much time staring at your office wall (at home or elsewhere), longing for the phone to ring, ‘just to talk to someone!’, or marvelling at the conversational versatility of your coffee cup, why not give this a go? It’s so much more than just ‘another bloody network!’

Our next event – “Untangling The Web – How To Get The Best Out Of Your Web Developers”, co-hosted by Royston Simpson Creative – is now less than two weeks away!

If you’re expecting a twenty/thirty-minute presentation full of worthy advice and/or “techie” webspeak, think again! None of us could manage worthy at that time in the evening, after a long day at work – and the only reason a few “techie” sentences will be allowed is so that we can lampoon them! Adam at Royston Simpson has put together a little video which will set the tone on the night. You can watch it here:

At the event, the video will kick off a discussion about how not to be the client – or web designer – from hell and how to produce the best possible site, without driving your designer, or client, to distraction … or should that be destruction …?

To book your place: Click HERE>>
or you can email us HERE>>>
or call us on: 0844 371 2941