Today’s my last day in Northern Ireland for 6 months.  For the past 5 years I’ve managed a highly motivated part of the Learning Pool team who are absent from our Derry mothership & who work from home in England and Scotland.  Tomorrow I become one of them.  This past couple of weeks I’ve been really mulling this over & wondering what it will mean for me.  I’m also slightly worried that I may not be the exemplary virtual team member that I imagine I will, a carbon copy of the perfect remote worker in the image I have in my mind’s eye.

In my view, these are the qualities & behaviours of a great virtual team member:

·         superb communicator – in both directions – giving & receiving information; this applies equally to customers & colleagues

·         highly organised in terms of managing appointments, follow ups, phone calls, CRM updates, keeping your online calendar bang up to date

·         ability to work efficiently on the hoof (on trains, in cafes, at airports, in the car)

·         knack to really bond with people you don’t see face to face much – other virtual colleagues but also the people in the powerhouse or mothership – the people you need to actually do things for you that you can’t do yourself

·         planning your schedule to get the most out of each day by combining appointments & using common sense

·         gift for really knowing what’s going on beneath the surface at HQ, think that comes about by really listening to what your colleagues say

·         makes the best use of the available technology & doesn’t get bogged down in constant technofail

·         books travel well in advance to get the best prices

·         effective collector & disseminator of customer information back to the mothership team

·         self starter with a lot of drive

·         ability to complete & finish things (this one is tricky for me) in a fast paced & constantly moving environment.

From time to time I’ve been critical of how other people do some or all of the above.  I guess I’ll know by this time next week how I’m doing myself.  Any hints and tips from you, my dear readers, will be most welcome as always.

So what am I going to miss most over the next 6 months when I’m London based.  Folks – there’s no competition on that score.  The photo of Paul was snapped yesterday at Stansted airport.  He’d just finished a conference call with our tech team & is posting something up on Twitter.  As usual, we had a few right old laughs yesterday – despite both of us having a 3.30am start, a tricky meeting at the Cabinet Office and the usual mixed bag of rushing around London for meetings, juggling stuff as we go.  Along the way, and starting at 5.30am, we also discussed everything that both of us are working on, we did some long term strategic planning, we both chatted to a number of colleagues, customers and partners, sketched out a couple of new products or markets for existing parts of the Learning Pool portfolio, swapped the usual load of gossip (mainly about other entrepreneurs or businesses), exchanged views on the content of business books we are both reading (cuts down on individual reading time if your business partner reads it & gives you a précis of course), managed to have both breakfast & lunch in the most random of places, went through some sort of time/space portal at Stansted airport, took two plane journeys & two long drives each, but were emailing again when we got to our respective homes last night.  The relationship anyone has (should have) with their business partner is pretty intense and full on.  I’ll refer you to a previous blog of mine if you’re interested in reading more about this – it’s here http://marymckenna.posterous.com/two-heads-are-better-than-one-10-pros-of-havi

We’ve been working together like this for 8 years, we rarely disagree and you couldn’t put a cigarette paper in between us.  I guess that’s what I’m going to miss most.

Yesterday Learning Pool hosted a visit from Northern Ireland Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Investment, Arlene Foster.  In case you missed it, at the end of 2011, Learning Pool was announced by Deloitte as the fastest growing technology company in Northern Ireland (as well as 6^th in Ireland, 26^th in the UK & 139^th in EMEA) based on revenue growth over the past 5 years.  They confirmed our growth to be a whopping 1,100% (gasp!).  The Minister expressed an interest in finding out more about the company so we invited her to call in.

We were a little apprehensive about her visit I guess.  As entrepreneurs we don’t have an awful lot to do with politicians (although maybe that needs fixing).  We didn’t really know what to expect from our allotted hour.

We needn’t have worried.  The Minister was friendly, personable, engaged & knowledgeable.  She spent the first half hour circulating around “Pool Heights” (our Derry HQ), chatting to our team and asking plenty of questions, her PA at her elbow jotting down a few notes.  The Learning Pool team are always keen to perform in front of an audience so they were in their element and there was a good bit of laughing and joking going on – especially when the Minister realised that we have two Americans on board (she asked them how come they live in the North West – you can guess the answer yourselves).  As we climbed through the floors of our building we watched members of the team showcase our new online finance training for government, demo some bespoke content and show the Minister a new set of graphics that are still work in progress.

Paul & I spent the last half hour in private conversation with the Minister while we all had a nice cup of tea (see photo).  Some of what we discussed was – the issues SMEs like us have in winning work with government, how we think procurement processes could be improved, some of the work we both do with Young Enterprise and our various digital interests (Paul with Digital Derry, me with Digital Circle), the role start ups play in creating a vibrant Northern Ireland economy and the work we both do with micro businesses, ideas around addressing the skills shortages we as a region are facing (we were glad the Minister brought that up and was well informed about the situation).

Thanks for coming by Minister, your new friends at Learning Pool are all fans!

I flew back from Los Angeles to London last week in economy class.  Whilst the British Airways flight was like hell on earth, it does only last 10 hours and you save a lot of money by flying economy.  However, amongst all the screaming & fidgeting & general bad behaviour that was taking place in front of me and behind me, my neighbour in the window seat (I was in the middle seat of three) was the exemplary travel companion and a joy to sit next to.  Why was this?

I’ll tell you why. 

She got onto the plane, was polite & said hello and then she got into her seat, got her pillow out, switched the tv on, put her headphones in & went to sleep.

We exchanged a few words during the night when the toddler in the seat in front of us was jumping on his seat facing us & screaming (his mother was watching a film – I guess she’d probably gone beyond the end of her tether & was doing her best) but apart from that we had no conversation until 20 minutes before the plane landed in London after we’d both been down to the bathrooms for a wash & a spruce up.

We’d passed trays & got up to let each other in & out but that was the extent of our interaction for 9½ of our 10 hours together.

Once we got chatting, it was nice to talk.  She was very pleasant & I’m sure we had a lot in common.  However, I’d rather be wishing I’d talked to my travel companion more having missed the opportunity than wishing I could move seats from someone I really don’t want to talk to for a 10 hour stretch.

I notice Dutch airline KLM launched their “Meet and Seat” app in December.  This will allow passengers to select seating neighbours having browsed their Facebook profiles.  I know what I’d be looking for.  Interested to hear what everyone else thinks on this topic.  I’ve heard fabulous Sir Ken Robinson mention his views and I know they are similar to mine – but maybe some of you like to find a chatterbox.  Funny long haul flight stories encouraged!

It’s a dog eat dog world out there, especially if you’re on the hunt for a job.  I’ve written a number of blogs over the past couple of years offering advice to people looking for new employment opportunities or getting ready to attend interviews and I always encourage people to be as proactive as they can.  This means being alert to opportunities as they come up, using your networks, sending carefully crafted emails or letters & cvs to organisations you want to work for, etc.  As we all know, a large percentage of jobs are never advertised – so it’s important that you get yourself on the radar.

However, you can go too far.  When that happens you can be in danger of either being disqualified for canvassing or you can just annoy someone so much that they put you on the “no thanks” list before you even get a chance to shine.

Recently I’ve started to receive large numbers of Linked In requests from people I don’t know.  Many of them are people that are looking for work.  Guys – this isn’t going to do you any favours.  First of all, I only connect with people on Linked In that I have met in real life & know and like.  I joked when David Cameron joined Linked In that he needn’t bother sending me a request as I wouldn’t accept it.  It’s the truth.  In my mind, it’s pointless being professionally “connected” with hundreds of people that I don’t know.  Twitter’s the place for that.

Sometimes, before I click the “ignore” option, I do take a look at the person’s Linked In profile.  Call that what you like – nosiness, curiosity, even politeness.  I live in Northern Ireland so if it’s a name I half recognise or someone that I think I may have met, I look at the profile to find out more information.  Surely that’s the point of having profiles.

I don’t then expect that person to send me a public tweet thanking me for looking at their Linked In profile & saying they hope Learning Pool will be in touch with them shortly. 

This is so wrong on so many levels:

1.       If we’ve advertised job vacancies, we’re in a process and using social media in this way to promote yourself to people in the company could be construed by some to be canvassing, and that can result in your application being disqualified from the process.  In Northern Ireland we work within very strict recruitment guidelines in order to meet legislation around equal opportunities in employment.

2.       I might sit in on interviews from time to time and I might meet people before we offer them a job, but it will be our team leads that are driving the recruitment process at Learning Pool not me.  If you contact me outside of the process, I am unlikely to know anything about the particular process you are in (we advertised 10 vacancies in the press on 27 December) and even if I was interested in your experience and skillset, I’m unlikely to mention you to one of our team leads – they’ll pick it up themselves as part of their shortlisting activity.

If you’re looking for a job & want to work at Learning Pool, spend time & effort instead improving your cv (most of the ones I see are dire) and writing a decent covering letter.  Or spend time getting onto our radar before we actually go out to recruitment – so that we already know you.  There are many ways you can do this – intelligent commenting on our forums, writing an interesting personal blog & making us aware of that, conducting interactions with us on Twitter or coming along to our events & chatting to us.

I know that many of you will have opinions or questions about this topic and I hope we can have some debate in the comments section.  As always, love to have your input.

On the Hertz car rental website, part of their mission statement reads that they “aim to be the most customer focused car rental company in every market (they) serve”.

That must exclude LA airport as this is what happened to us earlier this week.  Keep in mind we’d been travelling for almost 24 hours of elapsed time by this stage, given that it’s impossible these days to fly from the island of Ireland to the US west coast without changing planes somewhere (we’d elected to drive from Northern Ireland to Dublin, fly to London, change onto an American Airlines flight to LA).

First the customer service person tried to sell us LOADS of extras – and I mean LOADS.  She started with a car upgrade (if we’d wanted that we’d have just booked it online in the first place, bizarrely a smaller car than the one we ended up with but at an extra $10 per day) and progressed through a sat nav ending up with pre-paying for petrol.  We kept saying No Thanks but she kept to her script.  I was embarrassed for her & for us as it was excruciating.

Next she claimed that our online car hire (booked via Expedia – she was completely dismissive of them as well!) did not include any insurance.  None at all.  I knew this was not the case so I asked her to print out the contract so as I could read it.  She said she could not do that as our contract was with Expedia and not with Hertz.  This farce continued for about 10 minutes where I kept insisting that the booking I had made included insurance – I wouldn’t have booked it otherwise given it was for the US!  Eventually, she told us she had “found” the insurance clause and she had made a mistake.  She did ask us if we wanted to upgrade the insurance we’d booked however as it was “inadequate”.

The final straw was telling us we’d have to pay for an extra day’s car hire because the time we are due to return the car is an hour later than the time we collected it.  That was because US immigration was unbelievably quick on Wednesday.  You win some you lose some I guess.  She did offer that we could go & hang around in their grotty cafe for an hour if we wanted to collect the car at the time we’d booked it for.  An hour. 

Come on Hertz.  Is this the best you can do.  The last time I used Hertz was September 2001.  I was in the US working at the time & because of 9/11 couldn’t get a flight home & had to stay on for another 2 weeks.  Hertz charged me an extortionate amount of money for the extension & I remember standing in the same office at LAX arguing with another customer service person about whether or not it was their company’s objective to benefit from a national disaster in such an opportunistic manner.

There are plenty of car hire companies about so my advice would be don’t use Hertz.  I certainly won’t be using them again.  I don’t have the strength for the arguments!  On the plus side, the way that experience made me feel also gave me a warm feeling about how we never nickel and dime anyone at Learning Pool – it's a horrible thing to do to customers and it just isn’t worth it in the overall scheme of things.

I know that car hire is something a lot of you will have horror stories about so come on – name & shame.  Send us your experiences in the comments below.  You know we love to read them.

Folks – I’m on holiday so my blogs will be holiday related (probably film reviews – went to see J Edgar last night) for the next few weeks. 

On Thursday evening, I was privileged to join a group of people at the House of Lords to celebrate a significant milestone reached by the Rix Centre.  The Rix Centre, hosted within the University of East London, is a charitable organisation that uses technology to improve the lives of people with learning disabilities.  Last week’s event was to celebrate the Centre achieving 5 years of innovation with its “Living Lab”.  It was both wonderful and humbling to speak with some of the Centre’s Champions who were present on the evening showcasing various video and other multimedia projects they have created.  You can find out more about the work of the Rix Centre here http://www.rixcentre.org/about-us/

I attended the event with Maureen Piggot, Trustee of the Rix Centre and Director of Mencap in Northern Ireland and Ian Graham, Chief Executive of Momentum, the trade association for Northern Ireland’s ICT industry.  All of us have a career long interest in helping people learn so it made for a useful and fascinating evening.

Lord Brian Rix is by far the most sprightly 87 year old I’ve met in a long time.  He and his wife Elspet Gray (I’m ashamed to admit I know her best from the first series of Blackadder, she played the Queen) were delightful hosts and hearing about the various charities they are involved in made me really want to do more both personally and with Learning Pool.  On that note I’ll be contacting Rix Centre Director Andy Minnion next week to see if there’s anything we at Learning Pool can co-produce or help out with at the Centre.  You should too.

I’m getting ready to move to London in the New Year.  There, I’ve said it.  Learning Pool started life in London in a rented loft in Crawford’s Passage in Farringdon before shifting our HQ back to Derry.  We used to call our London base Crawford’s Pass amongst ourselves because it made it sound more Irish.  In our early days we were paranoid about customers knowing we were a Northern Ireland company in case it was a barrier to us doing business.  As the last 5 years have progressed, we became less coy about our origins as we cemented our customer relationships although we hung onto our London phone number.  These days, our customers love the fact that we’re an Irish company and some of them have even been to visit us at our office in Derry.  Others have even been brave enough to join our team.

Our fabulous Head of Content, Deborah Limb, joined us from another more famous e-learning company.  Deborah had never been to Northern Ireland before her first day at Learning Pool.  She arrived at our office on a cold, wet, Monday morning in November 2007, clutching the remnants of a sopping wet map in her hand.  She still claims she never saw daylight during that first winter.

Now it’s my turn to go back the other way and it’s a bittersweet feeling that I have.  I lived in London for 17 years before moving home to County Tyrone at the start of the new millennium.  I left the pushiness of the city behind & moved right into the middle of rural Ulster.  I’ll never forget waking up that first morning & hearing no sounds.  Nothing at all.  I remember the relief I felt & ever since that day, I’ve half felt as though I’m on holiday – a sort of working holiday where you work harder than you’ve ever worked before but your colleagues & neighbours are so friendly that it somehow compensates you.

I quickly learned to be less brusque & more chatty in my interactions.  More talk about the weather & people you know & less focus on the agenda is the Northern Irish way.  Gradually the sharp edges from all those years spent living in the city were worn down a little.  Of course I’ve been back in London pretty much every week since 2000 – sometimes twice a week – but always as a visitor, staying in a hotel room, running for a plane home as soon as the meetings are finished.  I’m wondering how I’ll slot back into the hurly-burly of London life after the deep, deep peace of country living (quoted with a nod to Mrs Patrick Campbell).

So why am I as a person and why are we as a business doing this?  I guess we’re fed up with fighting for what’s right (that it should be just as easy to do business from Northern Ireland as it is from any part of the UK or indeed Europe) & accepting what’s reality.  Like it or not, London is indeed where UK government’s beating heart lies.  It’s also where a large number of our customers, a huge number of potential customers and some of the people we’d like to work more closely with are based.  On top of that, our Northern Ireland location is stifling Learning Pool’s growth as there just aren’t the skills here that we need to recruit in to grow our business.  We’ve raised this point many times with Invest Northern Ireland.  We’re further hampered by having an ornament of an airport 5 miles from us in Derry that we never use as the flight times aren’t conducive to being anywhere on time to do business – and the government agencies and politicians seem more interested in in-fighting & scoring points off each other than looking outwards & making Northern Ireland an easier place from which to operate internationally.  In summary, we’ve concluded we’re missing out on opportunities and holding ourselves back by not having a London presence.  And I think that’s a very sad state of affairs.  Learning Pool was recently confirmed by Deloitte to be Northern Ireland’s fastest growing tech company & the 6^th fastest growing on the island of Ireland, but we have to look to London in order to continue our expansion.

Of course there’s plenty of upside.  I’m looking forward to being back in the heart of the capital for a six month period and I’m intending throwing myself into the whole London work/social scene and spending plenty of time with friends & colleagues, old & new.  I’m looking for somewhere to base Learning Pool London right now so watch this space & all will be revealed.

I know this is an emotive topic, especially for other Northern Ireland businesses – so I’m looking forward to your views & a lively discussion in the comments below.  Keep ‘em coming!

A few of my contemporaries were surprised to hear that I was at the CBI Conference this past week and given the demographic amongst the conference attendees I’m honestly not surprised.  We had a laugh on Twitter about how only 5 of 1,000 or so delegates were tweeting – but that’s a subject for another blog.  From my perspective, it was worth the time & effort just to hear Fiat & Chrysler Group CEO, Sergio Marchionne, speak about how he’s wrestled Fiat back from the brink of oblivion, kicking & screaming – again a subject for another blog.

My real interest was in hearing what the CBI, the Prime Minister & the Foreign Secretary had to say about helping SMEs with potential high value overseas opportunities get started with and be more successful at export.  Just to give you some background, we at Learning Pool have had what could be described as quite a frustrating experience of export as a UK based SME.  Our online learning content has been created exclusively for the UK public sector, and as such is of value & immediate interest to any of the former British colonies, especially those that have adopted the UK local government model.  Here in the UK, we have 500,000 public sector employees & stakeholders (primarily school governors, elected members and government “partners” such as community & voluntary sector groups & charities) making use of our learning environments & sharing great content.  However, despite displays of strong interest from overseas governments in our products, we have spectacularly failed to convert any of that interest to tangible sales – and I promise you we’ve tried really hard.

Learning Pool completely gets that the economic future of some UK based SMEs will be dependent on their ability to sell to the emergent BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) who together are forecast to import goods & services valued at $4 trillion over the next 10 years (source, Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs, CBI conference 21 Nov 2011 – he also coined the BRIC acronym a decade ago).  Our issue has been that it is incredibly difficult for overseas governments to buy from a “foreign” SME – no matter how fabulous & suitable their product is.  Our experience of this is that the type of export assistance our own regional development agency here in Northern Ireland, Invest Northern Ireland, has been able to give us (up to 40% financial assistance for trade missions overseas, paid after you’ve spent the money) is not what we need.  We’ve repeatedly explained to our contacts at Invest NI that what we actually need is some assistance from their people based overseas – but unfortunately those people are tasked with bringing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into Northern Ireland & are therefore unable to help us.

I was therefore very heartened to hear from first the Prime Minister, then the Minister of State for Trade & Investment Stephen Green, then from William Hague that the current government has helping UK SMEs export firmly in its sights.  They each described how training of UKTI employees is taking place to make that team more commercial (I was a bit dismayed when someone said this consisted of forcing their people to read the FT every day – but hopefully that’s just a start!), how 30 and 50 new business-focused employees have been brought into the UKTI offices in India & China respectively, and how the new UKTI Chief Exec Nick Baird (appointed September this year) has a remit to encourage more UK SMEs to move into the international domain.  William Hague specifically described how the role of the Foreign Office has been reshaped to place more emphasis on commercial diplomacy and David Cameron reminded us that our overseas embassies are there to help UK businesses host launches and win orders.

I am pleased to have seen David Cameron lead trade missions to India, China & Turkey since he became Prime Minister and as a co-owner of a small SME fail to understand why he has been so publicly criticised for this.  Governments of the BRIC nations understand how important it is to build relationships with other countries and take a long term view of commerce.  The UK has been swamped with visits from teams from the emergent nations and the lack of reciprocal behaviour is leaving the UK behind the curve.  At the moment, the value of UK exports to the Republic of Ireland is greater than total export value from the UK to the BRIC nations...surely everyone can see how that path isn’t sustainable?

We are serious about growing Learning Pool and seizing our opportunities so what does that look like for us?  We’ve accepted that it’s nigh on impossible to achieve from a Northern Ireland backwater so we’re grasping the nettle and opening a London office in January that I’m going to be heading up.  We’ve also asked our contacts at the Cabinet Office, on the back of Learning Pool’s success in the Innovation Launchpad competition this summer, to request a meeting for us with Nick Baird so as we can talk directly to him about how UKTI can help Learning Pool get started in India, selling to their local and central government.  I’ll keep you posted on how we get on.  Interested in your comments or advice as always.

We all know the first rule of Fight Club – (shhh – don’t mention it) – but what are the rules of Start-Up Club?  These are the 10 Rules I’d suggest to someone starting out with a new business:

Rule 1 – Just Do It – the time will never be right & there’s no point in procrastinating, obsessing over the fine detail (you’ll find out soon enough you can’t control things anyway) or delaying.  Grasp the nettle & get going.  Entrepreneurs have many sayings but one that I like a lot is “Leap and a net will form”.  Well – it either does or it doesn’t but there’s only one way to find out.

Rule 2 – seek out a great name and then get a great strapline.  It might not be the one you start out with but keep looking.  All our companies (so far) have had great names including my very first company which was called Kicking Assets.  Keep thinking – it doesn’t cost you anything to think but this is stuff that makes a high impact.

Rule 3 – network like mad both online & in real life.  Not to the exclusion of all else of course but do work at it.  I’ve written a previous blog about networking which you can read here http://marymckenna.posterous.com/so-you-want-to-network

Rule 4 – be well informed, there’s no excuse these days not to be – we have the internet!  Join the appropriate groups (online & real life, like Northern Ireland’s Digital Circle) & talk/listen to other entrepreneurs.  You have to work at this too.

Rule 5 – ask for help if you need it.  Most people are generous with their time & advice and everyone wants you to be a success.  When people help you out, be gracious & don’t abuse their good nature.

Rule 6 – look for innovation in your product or service, your product delivery channel and also your business model.  Innovation in your business model can be a real differentiator.  Again – this doesn’t cost you anything, you just need to think about it.

Rule 7 – don’t go it alone.  Find a business partner or a couple of non execs or perhaps seek out a mentor or join a collaborative network.  Starting a business is too hard for a person to do by themselves and a problem shared is a problem halved.  I have another blog about this specifically which you can read here if you want to know more http://marymckenna.posterous.com/two-heads-are-better-than-one-10-pros-of-havi

Rule 8 – get good advice.  Shop around for an understanding bank (we quickly moved away from our first bank when they wouldn’t support our growth strategy & these days bank with the fabulous Northern Bank) and once you find them, have an open and honest relationship with your bank manager.  Talk to other entrepreneurs and start-ups about the accountants and legal firms they use.  Look for modern professional advisers that understand online businesses and who use technology and social networking themselves.  Cut a good deal by promising them they’ll get a decent payback when you exit.  Agree all your fees up front.  Never get any of these guys out of the Yellow Pages or equivalent.

Rule 9 – work hard and always be open and alert to opportunity.  Usually it doesn’t come up & slap you in the face – you need to be watching out for it.  I’m afraid working hard has to be a given.  Without doing it you will fail and anyone that tells you anything different than that is a liar.

Rule 10 – have some fun.  Running your own business or working in a start-up is the most fun you will ever have at work.  Sure it’s hard work & the lows can be pretty awful – but the highs are AMAZING & you get to hang out with some great people in your own team.

Send me your own tips in the comments below – I can’t wait to read them.