On Thursday, we travelled down to Birmingham for our second visit to the Small Business Sunday Winners Event held at the ICC. Every Sunday evening ex-Dragons Den star Theo Paphitis, an entrepreneur passionate about small businesses selects six companies from those who tweet him about their business and what makes them different. On a Monday evening, he re-tweets the selected businesses and they then become part of the #SBS winners club. We won our SBS award on the 14-12-14, just before Christmas and attended our first event in January 2015. Once a year Theo then invites the winners to an all inclusive event of talks, networking, questions and food and drink! This year the entrepreneurial guest speakers were Holly Tucker of Not on the High Street and Mike Pickles of really useful boxes.
On a Thursday evening, 30 of the SBS winners met up and went out for a meal, drinks and networking until 5am Friday Morning. It was some pretty intensive networking! 11am arrived and we rocked up to the ICC for the days events. After more networking, coffee drinking and biscuit eating we sat down and were introduced to the partners that help make the SBS event what it is. These partners included Ryman, Robert Dyas, Red Letter Days, iLaw, DHL and new for 2016 123-reg. Finally, Theo Paphitis walked on stage and told us how to make our own luck: “The harder you work, the luckier you get”. He also mentioned a new marketplace that would be exclusive to SBS winners to advertise their products and services.
Dinner was served which was a fine selection of Hot and cold food, we ate, topped up the drinks from the evening before and networked with our newly found friends.
After dinner we sat down and for the next two hours would listen to some interesting questions and answers which were being asked to the entrepreneurial panel, Theo came out with a cracker about competition copying what you do but we’ll not post it here, it was an SBS exclusive!
After the questions and answers, we managed to network some more before collecting goodie bags courtesy of Ryman Stationery and then went out for tea. We look forward to attending the SBS event 2017 and welcoming more small businesses to the SBS family. You also get a fantastic profile on the SBS winners website with a domain authority of 40+ this is fantastic for SEO link juice too.
