My day with Virgin .
Well, the one thing I can say with full conviction is that by the end of the day, I had an awful lot to think about.
Sir Richard’s question and answer session with the Virgin Media Pioneers and other guests was interesting, and amusing. I was impressed by the way he included other members of Virgin who were standing at the back of the room, and also included people who had come to him with an idea and how they had worked together to make it successful. Certainly the one thing came across loud and clear, Richard is a very good judge of character and once he has chosen, he trusts the person to do the job.
Meeting various people whilst having a buffet lunch was interesting too, mostly Virgin employees and all of them really pleased to be working for the company. Richard had said earlier, the job has to be fun, better than anyone else and something that people want. I certainly can see how that rubs off on his staff.
The afternoon sessions with the Fast Track 100 companies, was equally fascinating, the speakers were Mike Clare, Founder and president of Dreams, Keith Abel, co-founder and chief executive of Abel & Cole and Nick Jenkins, founder and chairman of Moonpig.com
Each of these speakers was inspirational in their own way, but the thing that came across to me was that they were driven people and not necessarily to make money, but to be good at what they did. They each believed in what they were doing and wanted to make sure their customers had a good product and were happy with it so therefore would come back for more.
I have to say I felt a little like a fish out of water, and having spent most of the night trying to work out why, I think I have the answer. Norman and I run a business, just like everyone in that room, but we don’t look at it like a business, we are not out to make huge profit for ourselves. Of course we have to pay the mortgage and live, but we are driven to raise money for the children’s charities. We have always been more interested in the cause, ever since we were volunteers and doing our little bit for Children in Need. We once were sent to discuss what we did with a top charity solicitor so we could establish what we actually are. It actually cost a huge amount of money to do this, (which I resented at the time) but in the end, she established that we were professional fundraiser’s, she guided us in the wording on our website and made sure that we were doing everything correctly and within the law. The one thing she did say to us was that we were the first people she had met, who actually looked at the end result as the most important, i.e. how much money can we make for the charities and not, as she said most fundraising businesses did, how much money can we make out of this by doing something for charity.
That certainly does not make us better than anyone else, perhaps it makes us more naive. We are certainly driven, but as in the Young Songwriters competition, we are driven to encourage the young people to have fun when entering our competition but also to learn something from the whole experience. We recognise that we have to “up our game” to get people to notice what we are doing and not so much trust in word of mouth and other peoples enthusiasm.
I certainly did get a lot out of the
day with Virgin, but not necessarily what I had expected. Could I take this opportunity to thank everyone who voted for me and gave me the chance to go.
http://www.young-songwriters.co.uk
http://www.virginmediapioneers.com
I stated that for the last 10 years we have self funded, but with The Young Songwriters competition, we are starting from scratch. Do we carry on self funding or do we look for a sponsor and possibly lose an element of control.
The answer - For a lot of the time, Virgin have self funded and Richard said it sometimes caused up and downs but of course you have overall control, but Stephen, the CEO of Virgin did add that it might be an idea to find someone who might have a sympathetic feeling towards what we are doing and then it may well work, if we ask for help on a small scale.
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