In this episode of The Power Up Project, we cover:

My three takeaways from running our live event, The Small Business Download, in October 2018, including:

〉Being with other people who understand that you "don't know what you don't know"

〉The value of collaborative learning

〉Finding the low hanging fruit

〉Join us for a free webinar on 22 November: Office 365 in the Real World

Transcript:

In this episode of The Power Up Project, we recap on The Small Business Download 2018.

Hi. Welcome to this episode of The Power Up Project. I'm your host, Ben Love, and today we're going to be recapping on a recent live event that we hosted, called The Small Business Download 2018. This was a fantastic event. It was a learning event which we put on for our clients, our partners, anybody else who wanted to come along. We had a panel of five industry experts, covering a range of business and technology topics, who were there to talk to us, to take questions, do a little bit of workshopping, even, at the end of the night there, around some of the problems and questions that our attendees had.

So what I wanted to share with you today is the three top takeaways that I really got out of the entire thing. The first one, you don't know what you don't know. Now, this is obviously a truism which we've all heard before, but what I'd say about this is that one of the real values of investing time in events such as The Small Business Download is that it gives the gift of being in the company of other business leaders who recognise that, at some level, there are things that they don't know, so they are consciously making the decision to invest the time, the money, the effort, to come along to events like this and to learn.

Now, this may sound fairly self-evident to a lot of you out there, but a lot of people do not go out of their comfort zone to put themselves in the situation where they will potentially learn something that they weren't aware of previously. A lot of people are confident in their own knowledge, a lot of people are quite comfortable that the way they're doing the job right now is the way that it should be doing, and so they don't take that next step. So the first lesson that I really learnt out of this is just reinforcing that, that you don't know what you don't know, and it's good to step outside and just expose yourself to some opportunities, cross-industry perhaps, to see what else is happening out in the big wide world.

Lesson number two that I took away from The Small Business Download 2018 is that collaborative learning is powerful. Now, one of the wonderful things about getting all of these people in the room, facilitated by our panel of five experts, was that we had people there across a broad range of industries, across a broad range of organisational profiles of size, of nature. We had some commercial organisations, we had educational institutions, we had non-profits, and everybody was there, sharing in the experience and collaborating together. There was a lot of sharing of stories, war stories in some cases, successes and victories in others. There was a lot of questions that arose from one industry, which interestingly enough, some people were able to map into an entirely different industry, to gain a unique perspective on something that may have been sticking them up for a little while now. So lesson number two was collaborative learning can be powerful, cross-industries, cross-organizations.

And number three, and this is the great one, and this is my important takeaway for you out of this episode, there is plenty of low hanging fruit. So some of the things that we touched on, on the day, in a very tactical sense are, for example, that a lot of people are not using a large part of their Office 365 subscription. A lot of organisations will subscribe to something l...