Just Practising

The Business Case for Looking after your People

Yesterday I was able to attend the Constructing Excellence in Essex event at Anglia Ruskin University in Chelmsford. The event was entitled Better Skills for Better Business, you can see the flier for the event here, but I wanted to post today about Liz Lake and her attitude to staff. Liz Lake is a Landscape [...]

What Good Architects Do – Subtlety and Process

Watch this video about Jonathan Ives, the industrial designer behind Apple’s success. Two things I think are interesting about it. Firstly how he describes the process of design and production, and how he stresses the subtlety of the result. ‘So many of the products we’re surrounded by, they want you to be very aware of [...]

[UPDATE] Linkedin Workshops for Construction Professionals

Thanks for your interest in the workshops I’m planning to run to help construction professionals use Linkedin properly. After two days, here is a quick screenshot of the response so far: Blue markers are single people, red are between 2 and 5, and yellow are more than 10. There are clusters beginning to develop around [...]

Why do we do one thing as Customers and another as Marketers?

David Meerman Scott , author of ‘The New Marketing and PR ’ often begins his talks with a question: In the last 1-2 months, privately or professionally, in order to research a product or service you might want to buy, raise your hand if you have: Answered a direct mail advertisement? Consulted mainstream media – [...]

Linkedin Workshops for Construction Professionals

Do you have a Linkedin account but don’t know how to use it? Have you been invited by clients or colleagues to join Linkedin and don’t know where to begin? I shall be running a special workshop for you – find out more here. On my recent travels around the country I’ve spoken to many [...]

Jacksons Fencing and Security Factory Tour and @Gate_Safe Summit

I’m working with Jacksons Fencing and Jacksons Security to help them work better with architects and specifiers, and spent a good day with them on Tuesday talking about the issues. Here’s a slide show of the factory tour I took with Helen from Zest and Marcia from Jacksons business development, who also runs their CPD [...]

Social Media the big subject at Kalzip TeamKal Conference [Video]

It was great to be invited to speak to the Kalzip TeamKal conference, not least because the audience of construction businessmen in their forties and fifties was always going to be skeptical about the value of Social Media to their own work. That made it a challenge, but also an opportunity, and I was pleasantly [...]

Looking back and looking forward with purpose

It has been an interesting twelve months for me, to say the least. This time last year I was in the uncertainty of hospital tests, but by April I had a 100% clean bill of health and could make plans. By the end of the summer those plans were set and I’ve spent the last [...]

Why don’t we network with our relatives?

I’ve been enjoying reading Andy Lopata‘s new book, Recommended: How to Sell Through Networking and Referrals, in which he guides the reader through creating a referral culture through networking. I’m also learning a great deal from his video tips – and thought I would share one with you. In this video clip Andy describes how [...]

Building a Better Architecture Business with Social Media

Friday’s RSAW Conference with architects in Wales was an excellent opportunity for practitioners from across the country and beyond to get together and think about running their practices. As promised, here are the slides from my presentation. You can view them here simply by clicking on the deck below, or you can ‘view on slideshare’ [...]