Company Spotlight: Creamer & Sundt

Creamer & Sundt is a bespoke management consultancy based in London and Glasgow. Alistair Creamer is described as “a catalyst, a creative and a bridge-builder”, and Anna Sundt as “a business psychologist, facilitator and artist”.

In their own words, they work with businesses to “bring about change by using the arts to engage people, inspire better ways of working and accelerate learning and development”. They talk about taking art out of the everyday and putting it into the hearts of the organisations they work with.

Creamer & Sundt's clients are varied and come from across multiple sectors, including Unilever, Film London, Buttle UK and Chichester Festival Theatre. Their inspirations, listed on their website, come from far and wide, spanning the full breadth of the creative arts.

They focus on three main areas:

• Connecting – finding your purpose and communication.
• Creating – innovation and culture change.
• Acceleration – team and leadership development.

Connect

Creamer & Sundt apply the mindset of an artist to their ideas about communication. This means bringing your message to life through a mixture of storytelling, visuals and video.

• Focus on communication within your organisation – people want to feel good about company goals, how they are contributing to the company's success and how the company is performing.
• People need to know “why” - what is the purpose behind your business?

“People don't buy what you do. They buy why you do it” - Simon Sinek

Create

The belief that everyone is creative and that companies are more successful when people are creative at work is a core element of their approach to business. They bring this creative approach into businesses in two ways: innovation and culture change.

• When people come to them with a specific challenge, they try to play it back to them and disrupt their thinking, creating the space and environment for them to see that challenge in a fresh way.
• They also have a passion for working brands that are serious about culture – these projects are a long-term investment in people.
• Engaged employees are the best employees; people really living the values are the ones who deliver.

“If you are going to evolve, to survive and thrive, then you too will need to think more creatively. And you'll need to do it faster, too” ― Nick Souter, 'Breakthrough Thinking'

Accelerate

From strategy conferences in Amsterdam to team-building days in Soho, Creamer & Sundt consider their team events to be their signature work.

• They aim to help you get the most out of your budget and time together, pushing the envelope of what can be achieved “off-site” to pull off some truly invigorating team events.
• Creativity is a key quality in modern leadership.
• Creamer & Sundt's leadership programmes are “a journey of discovery” - they work through challenges, design unique learning sessions, and coach both teams and individuals.

“Change will never be this slow again” ― Mark Holden, PHD Media Worldwide

Watch this space for an exclusive interview with director Alistair Creamer.

Click here to see our membership packages or here to subscribe to our mailing list. Leave a comment below to let us know your opinion on this week's business news or if there are any major stories we missed.

Our next event will be at Indigo Blue on 9th November. We hope to see you there!

6 Top Tips to Up Your Company's Social Media Game

1. Try to insert a call to action into the bottom of every post. This won't always be possible – the character limit on Twitter is often a barrier to this and you can't put links on Instagram posts – but the more, the better. Link to your blog or website, ask questions and invite comments. This allows you to generate further interest without coming across as a constant salesperson who's more interested in profit than customers.

2. Schedule your updates to post just before or after the hour. This targets business people like marketers, office workers and managers who check their social media just before or after a meeting. Sometimes it's all about the timing.

3. YouTube users should check out this post on the Gleam Marketing Blog explaining how to add a small light-box pop-up to your page, encouraging visitors to subscribe to your channel. All you need to do is add the following text to the end of your YouTube URL whenever you share it:

?sub_confirmation=1

4. Use aggregator apps like Tweetdeck to streamline your social media experience, viewing multiple accounts simultaneously without having to log in to each one separately. This saves time and helps to keep your content consistent.

5. Visuals are important. This might seem obvious but posts on social media that include some kind of visual element, either a photograph or video, tend to have a wider reach and invite active engagement with content. Make sure your visuals are relevant, consistent and prolific.

Think about optimizing your visual content with links – an image or video can act as a 'gateway' to more valuable content, such as your main website or blog. For example, place a link to your website in the description of a YouTube video or the profile section of your Instagram account.

6. Post with empathy. Be kind, polite and acknowledge others. Make sure to interact with your followers and other businesses – your social media accounts do not exist in a vacuum. Social networking is by nature designed to be interactive and it's most effective when you use it as a networking tool, rather than a broadcasting platform. This means letting them know that you're reading their posts by hitting the link button, sending them direct messages or retweeting/reblogging their relevant content.

More Information

20 Social Media Marketing Tips From the Pros – http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-tips-pros/

5 Ways To Cross Promote Social Media Posts – https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/tips-tricks/5-ways-to-cross-promote-social-media-posts

3 Ways to Use Google Analytics to Evaluate Your Audience – http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/3-ways-to-use-google-analytics-to-evaluate-your-audience/

11 Creative Ways to Use Live Streaming on Snapchat, Facebook Live & More - http://blog.hubspot.com/marketing/live-streaming-ideas#sm.001nxq8xi1ccgcowrmv1pdizwmz22

Click here to see our membership packages or here to subscribe to our mailing list. Leave a comment below to let us know your top tips for a successful social media presence.

Our next event will be next week at TateHindle on 12th October. We hope to see you there!

How to Boost Innovation and Problem Solving Through Collaboration

Working together is one of the hardest and most rewarding aspects of our work lives. Different personality dynamics, skill sets and experiences are present in every team and in every workplace. The best teams succeed both because of and despite of this diversity.

When you're working on a project that spans several different disciplines, the ability to consult others who are experts in the core-competencies needed to make the project work is crucial. Not only will they have the required knowledge but they mostly likely look at the project from a new, different angle, seeing things and sparking off ideas that you wouldn't have done on your own.

Building a diverse team is often the only way to assemble the breadth of knowledge and skills required to pull off a complex, innovative project. For example, a film production needs researchers, scriptwriters, producers, cameramen, grips, actors, etc. Each of those people brings specific skills to the table as well as their own ideas, biases and unique point of view.

Even having multiple people with similar skill sets working on one specific aspect of the project can produce unique insights and brand new perspectives as they will come from different backgrounds, have trained at different schools and have different experiences influencing the way they think.

Collaboration Outside Your Business

Collaborating with other businesses provides the potential to experiment with new product areas and ideas as well as introducing both parties to a brand new customer base. It's important to carefully choose who you work with as collaborators who are different to you will often bring the most innovation to partnership.

Working with businesses in another industry or with a different audience in the same industry to pool client and press contacts is often beneficial, but it's also important that you're on the same page in terms of the final outcome and any ethical considerations.

However, it may be preferable to work with businesses with the same goals and customer bases. This helps increase your existing knowledge of your specific area of work as well as ensuring a greater level of understanding within the partnership.

Top Tips

1. Set Goals. Make sure that everyone knows exactly what they're working towards. This helps to keep individuals focused on team goals and provides measurable indicators of success.

2. A good team will share knowledge freely, learn from one another, help one another complete jobs and meet deadlines, and share resources.

3. Communicate. Share your ideas and listen to others. Digital tools such as Asana or Podio can be helpful for staying in contact and sharing information, especially for remote working teams. Podio is also useful for keeping a shared record of contacts and events.

4. Colleagues who focus not just on their own goals and the goals of the team/company but also each other's individual goals, working together to help everyone achieve what they need to in the best possible way, often get the best results.

5. Remember, colleagues should tell you when an idea is great but they should also let you know when it needs improvement and when it's so terrible that you need to scrap it immediately.

More Information

To Build Your Business, Smash Your Silos – https://www.fastcompany.com/1839317/build-your-business-smash-your-silos

5 Reasons why collaboration contributes to innovation – https://www.freshconsulting.com/5-reasons-why-collaboration-contributes-to-innovation/

The unexpected business benefits of collaboration – https://www.trainingjournal.com/articles/opinion/unexpected-business-benefits-collaboration-0

5 Reasons Why Collaboration Is Essential in Today's Business Environment – http://www.inc.com/natalie-nixon/5-reasons-why-collaboration-is-essential-in-today-s-business-environment.html

Event: Building Trust With Your Customers

This week was our first event of the Autumn term and was attended by a diverse range of London's business people from a multitude of different industries. We would like to thank Geri McAndrew and ButtleUK for hosting the event at their offices in Victoria.

This week's hotseat topic was building trust between a business and its customers in a unique way. For our hotseater, who runs his own, one-man financial consultancy, the core issue was whether there were different and more innovative ways with which to build trust with his customers.

Questions

In the exploratory section of the event (where the group asks questions in order to clarify the question and explore the issue) the questions included;

• How do you know when you have won a client’s trust?
• What is the profile of a typical client?
• What do you understand by the term 'trust'?
• Why do you do what you do?
• What separates you out from other financial advisers?

Ideas

Our attendees then discussed the issue and offered advice. Some of the highlights were:

• Identify your unique selling point – if you don't know what it is, then your clients won't be able to see it either.
• Your clients need to know that you care about them, that you understand their situation and that they come first.
• Genuinely listening to your clients is an essential tool to create trust.
• Get some really good feedback – what do clients think of you?
• Aim to show, not tell – this is what will ultimately drive trust between yourself and your customers.
• People don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it.

Conclusions

Our hotseater then reflected back to the group. His main conclusions were that he needed to focus on learning how to listen well and tell great stories in order to relate better to his clients.

The main takeaway from the event was that business is always about putting people first, no matter what industry you're in and that it is too easy to lose sight of that fact. When trying to build trust, it's important to be able to engage with your customers on a human level, to demonstrate that you can relate to and are interested in their unique circumstances.

An interesting outcome was that, in a discussion which looked like being about the ‘hard sell’ the group settled on the importance of selling the person, rather than the product. As one participant remarked “we succeed when we show who we are”.

Click here to see our membership packages or leave a comment below.

Our next event will be at TateHindle on 12th October. We hope to see you there!

How to Network Effectively (and Why)

Networking is a term that we throw around a lot in our working lives. It's one of those polarising things that people either really love or really hate. Or really love to hate. So what is networking and why is it important?

In the world of business, networking is essentially the process of connecting and interacting with others to exchange information and develop professional contacts. In other words, networking is about meeting and talking to people who you will be able to work with in the future, either collaboratively to create something new or to problem solve for one another.

If you want to be able to network effectively, you have to be able to ask your self not only “what can this person do for me?” but also “what can I do for them?” If you give as much as you take, then you can build up goodwill. It's up to you and your network to then keep that momentum going but asking 'what's next?”

A lot of people see networking as manipulative and as a necessary (perhaps even unnecessary) evil in the business world. This doesn't have to be the case. Good, effective networking is a symbiotic relationship; two or more parties connecting and creating genuine relationships to get things done.

Is all networking good networking?

It's a common misconception that all networking is worthwhile. Not only do you need to make sure that you aren't wasting someone else's time but also that they aren't wasting yours.

When it comes to joining networking groups, be discerning and never feel pressured to sign up. Some groups have a strong, solid purpose and others are scams, hitting up business owners for joining fees. If it feels right and you want to be a part of it, then jump right in. But if it doesn't, then it just isn't worth your time.

Making sure, going in, that you know exactly what you want and why you are networking in the first place. Don't do it just because you think you're supposed to; it's okay to break the 'rules' if they aren't going to be useful to your business.

Be a Connector

One of the best ways to build your network and to build your personal brand is to introduce people within that network to one another. Not only does this help to improve your relationship with those people – they feel valued and are far more likely to remember you – but it helps them to expand their own network. Often, those will be the people who will offer you work or help you out later down the line.

With this in mind, don't spend all our time in industry specific groups. Diversify the events you attend and the connections you make because you never know when you're going to want to diversify your brand or need that outside knowledge on a project.

Again, good networking isn't just about helping yourself, it's about helping others. Your experiences and knowledge should be as value to the people in your network as theirs are to you. Share you expertise, be nice to everyone and shelve your ego. When people see that you're interested in helping them, they're more likely to trust you and reciprocate.

Top Tips

1. Be authentic, genuine and trustworthy. Not only will this boost your reputation in the long run but people are more likely to work with you in the short term.

2. Consider what you can do for others as well as what they can do for you.

3. Know what your goals are and what you need to succeed.

4. Choose your networking groups carefully. If it doesn't feel supportive, then walk away.

5. Ask open-ended questions in networking meetings to open up the discussion and show members that you're interested in what they have to say.

More Information

How to network like you really mean it - http://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/8-things-power-networkers-do-make-connections.html

How to network effectively - https://www.nytimes.com/ref/open/finance/OPEN-NETWORK-EFFECTIVELY.html

Create an effective networking strategy - http://www.marketingdonut.co.uk/marketing/sales/sales-lead-generation/create-an-effective-networking-strategy

How to Use Social Media Effectively in Your Business

Social media is no longer just the domain of high schoolers and hipsters posting about Sunday brunch. There over 3 billion internet users, over 2 billion of which have active social media accounts. Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn and even Snapchat have become vital to success in the business world, particularly for start-ups and those looking to extend brand awareness beyond their core audiences.

In 2011, Hiscox commissioned a study looking at business usage of social media with responses from 305 owners, partners and senior decision makers from UK SMEs with between 1- 249 employees. They found that 57% of small businesses use social media in their marketing with the most common purpose being to increase brand awareness and boost sales. Facebook was the most popular platform with 19% using it for business related activity, compared to 14% using LinkedIn. These figures have only increased in more recent years.

Social media is mostly free and can provide businesses with valuable metrics about their customers and the ways in which they engage with specific content. In fact, social media generates a massive amount of data about your customers and their online habits in real time, every day.

Engagement

Through daily active engagement and ‘social listening’, you can gather customer data and use that information to make smarter, better informed decisions about your business. This means directly interacting with customers to find out what they’re talking about, what they want and how they use your products. Respond to tweets, ask questions and follow hashtags.

There are many tools that you can utilise to make analysing the data collected by social media platforms easier, in order to gauge customer reactions to content, tap into conversations happening around your brand, and find out what works and what doesn’t. For example, Hootsuite Insights enables users to gather together information from across all their social media platforms in real time and in one place.

Social Media Listening

Basically, social listening means actively seeking out what is being said about a company, brand, topic or person on social media channels. This could mean anything from tracking mentions of your company on Facebook to keeping track of trends in your industry that competitors are posting about on Twitter and LinkedIn.

There are many ways to engage in social listening. You could set up Google Alerts to track keywords in your industry or use Social Mention to monitor over 100 sources to measure what people are saying about you and your business. TweetReach offers basic, easy to use listening tools and ViralHeat allows you to not only listen to conversations about your brand but also to ‘identify trends to drive insights around your social media performance’.

Social media listening can massively aid in customer care – if you are actively hearing what your customers are saying, you can jump in and solve problems or just engage with your happy, satisfied customers. In the same vein, it provides direct access to feedback and can generate higher converting leads, through solving problems and highlighting your great customer service to future customers.

Targeted Advertising

Advertising on social media can be targeted towards specific demographics, promoting your business and distributing content to the people who you most want to reach. And then you can track and measure the performance of those ads in real time, allowing you to measure whether your desired audience are responding well to the copy and design.

For example, an ad campaign on Facebook can be targeted by location, age, interests, behaviours and friends among many others, making your advertising more effective. So if your company sells, for example, textbooks to university students and is based in Cambridge, you can ask Facebook to show your ads to people who are students at Cambridge University or are based in Cambridge and have expressed an interest in higher education.

Top Tips

1. Build your channels early. Start as you mean to go on – become a resource for information and a trusted communicator right from the start.

2. Find your audience. Different audiences can be found on different platforms so figure out where your target market can be found and focus on those platforms. For example, younger audiences are more likely to be found on Snapchat and Instagram, whilst older demographics tend to favour Twitter and Facebook.

3. Discover and create relationships with influencers. It’s not just what you know, but who you know.

4. Be a part of the conversation. Know what people are talking about and actively interact with them – social media is all about community and the personal touch.

More Information

How to Use Social Media to Boost Business - https://www.theguardian.com/small-business-network/2013/aug/29/social-media-boost-business-tips

20 Social Media Marketing Tips from the Pros - http://www.socialmediaexaminer.com/social-media-marketing-tips-pros/

The Top 10 Benefits of Social Media Marketing - http://www.forbes.com/sites/jaysondemers/2014/08/11/the-top-10-benefits-of-social-media-marketing/#2f67f83d2a4d

Welcome to the Brain Exchange!

About Us

Founded in October 2013, the Brain Exchange is an exclusive, diverse and high quality network for experienced business professionals. We are focused on solving problems and developing ideas through real, face-to-face connections and a passion for collaboration, learning and knowledge exchange. Busy, experienced business people come to our events to relax, reflect and review their situation honestly.

Join the Circle

No two meetings are the same – the participants, venue and topic change every time. Each group is comprised of a small, diverse group of people with a range of business skills and experiences to bring to the debate. With the benefit of professional moderation in a confidential, relaxing environment, the group focuses on a work-based issue presented by a member and as a team, participants analyse the issue and work towards a practicable solution.

By becoming a member, you gain access to a wealth of ideas and different perspectives on a range of business topics. Our events provide members with experiential learning about effective problem-solving and teamwork, as well as a new ideas for their business and their own professional development. We also offer regular interaction with the wider Brain Exchange community via an exclusive online forum and regular e-newsletters.

Our Blog

Every week we will be posting a variety of articles on our new blog from news round-ups to tips to interviews of high profile business people with something to say.

Mondays will be a profile of a business or person, Wednesdays will feature tips and advice for a successful business, and Fridays will be our weekly news round-up day. And look out for special Thursday posts after a meeting, where we offer a summary of what was discussed and any useful conclusions that the group reached.


Click here to see our membership packages or leave a comment below with any questions.

Our next event will be at Buttle UK on 14^th September. We hope to see you there!