Courageous, Adventurous, Inspiring and Enduring Entrepreneurs

We had our last networking event of the year this morning and it was a fabulous event. We had input from 2 very different speakers, John Rice from JamMedia and Siobhan McAleer from The Mortgage Shop. The speakers role was to stimulate conversation and ideas and faciliatate networking and they did all that and more.

Siobhan's input showed us very clearly how a vulnerability can be a strength if matched with steely determination. She stressed the importance of our Business Allies when times are tough and urged us to break long term relationships with extreme caution. When talking about leadership she said that it is incumbant on all leaders to paint a picture where the sun will shine again, to have our feet firmly on the ground but look up, up, up.

John Rice gave us all a good laugh by playing some of his award winning and contract bearing video and cartoon clips. He talked about his early beginnings and tracks his success right back to getting very bad leaving cert results. How often have we heard the story of successful businesses starting from positions of adversity?

David Bradshaw joined us from Invest NI and with his refeshingly different "can do" approach has no doubt stimulated some new ideas which will undoubtedly be pitched to INI.

The roundtable discussion that followed talked about the very real importance of networking, the need to invest in as many speculative conversations as possible, working smart, faking it until you make it, the importance of growing and supporting our indigenous businesses but also maximising the opportunities from FDI. An emerging conversation around the NW getting together as a region was a theme that threaded through a number of comments.

A tour of HML and overview of their business operations followed the event which gave members a great chance to gain a better insight into one of our flagship employers.

The importance of further developments in relation to access to and from the NW was raised by our host company, HML and this will continue to be a key lobbying issue for Chamber throughout 2010.

All in all a great event and one we hope to replicate and build on in 2010.