It was lots of fun, although I am a natural at being hopeless, but look at Ronny:

What a natural. so where the others in our group, here’s another picture. It was a wonderful way to break the ice, as going into a room full of strangers is always daunting but everybody was giggling and dropping balls and chucking them at each other instead of at their own hand (at least most of us did, unintentionally so) and you felt an instant connection with everyone. Someone even tried to coach me and I think I moved up from totally hopeless to mediocrely hopeless.

Here, Mister Business Junction announces to the group that he is seriously hung-over.

All in all, it was well worth spending the money and more over the time of 2 hours + to mingle with other businesses in Hoxton and Shoreditch – we met loads of interesting ones, ranging from a photographer who shot HRH the Duke of Kent (not literally) to IT firms, branding consultants and a not-boring logistics business.

I was in turn surprised at his surprise and thought “surely this is the only way how I can find out what type and style of website we should design for his business?” but he said that previously, he commissioned web designers to build a website and they built a website, not many questions asked.

So I guess we are much more than just ‘website builders’ – we put a lot of effort and time into the design process and of course the research process that comes before that – what are you about? What makes you tick? The business owner often plays a vital part in forming the soul of the business, and it is important to know the overall strategy. So for this gentleman, while his current website sold him as a personal coach, he only talked about corporate coaching to me and while his website didn’t set him apart much from other coaches, he was able to show me really quickly that he was really different from others, and that it is going to be quite easy to make that come across in a new web design.

So as a result, the tasks ahead are not only rebuilding his site, but restructuring his services, his presentation of himself and getting a strategy etched out to see what will be the most important thing for him, going forward. It was fun to meet and to dissect all this – I’d take as long as it needs to get to the bottom of it all, that is the foundation we need in order to offer a good web design service and an appropriate web development route, too.

Well, Steffi has found it! It is called the big picture and we are able to create blobs in various colours. So one colour represents me (the Moustique pink of course) and I create as many pink blobs as needed to represent all my management tasks. Another colour represents Neville (a nice and friendly orange, as nice and friendly as he is), and various shades of blue and green represent our other web coders – they chose more sober and cool colours, quite fitting for a web developer, really. And my web and graphic designer ladies are a light shade of warm yellow. As beautiful as their web designs – or graphic designs, as we offer that as well.

So we have lots of blobs that show us which web design or graphic design projects need to be done, and if they are more urgent projects, they are bigger, and if they are less urgent, they are smaller. Cool! I am really excited – finally I can throw all the bits of paper away and just look at once central screen.

It has been a busy few weeks and weekends what with the tradeshow-  and instantly afterwards, we rushed to get the business moved to the other end of town – in this scorching heat! We are now at 77 East Road near Old Street Tube station, and here is what our new set-up looks like:

Here are pictures of the day:  http://www.flickr.com/ and here is a picture of us on the stand, as shot by the BNI photographer Peter Mukherjee:

A fellow BNI friend, Emma from Currency Solutions, let me know that I was there, huge and visible, on the front page of a speednetworking site. I went there last year for my sins for a spree of – well, speed networking of course. It was at the Bstartup fair in Earls Court. I think that they should at least link to the websites of their unsuspecting victims but there is nowhere on the site to contact them… hhmmm…