ACCA Lunch Glasgow on 9th November 2012 – by Anthony Pfaff
Friday saw myself and my colleague David Meikle attending an ACCA (Association of Chartered Certified Accountants) networking lunch in the Central Hotel with Julian Taylor from Scottish Enterprise as the lunch time speaker. We were the guests of Andrew Morrison, an official networker at this event. It was my first time in the Central Hotel since the refurbishment. Still a bit of scaffolding but on the whole shaping up well!
The event was billed as a networking event. The key to good networking is to run an event where it is easy to interact and meet new people. This is often hard to achieve as people tend to gravitate to their comfort group at such events. I would say that the official networkers need to be encouraged to actively facilitate conversations with people who don’t know each other in order to become more than a lunch with a speaker event although this aspect was also informative and challenging.
Networking is certainly something that YUVA Consultants are good at and we offer training on!
I had the opportunity to chat to Andrea Mills the new Glasgow president over an excellent lunch and wished her well in this challenging role before she expertly introduced the speaker.
Julian Taylor gave a thought provoking presentation – giving a general overview of businesses in Scotland. There were around 300,000 businesses in Scotland, but 211,000 of these had no employees – meaning they were either dormant, or shell companies, or sole director companies. Just over 93% of companies had nine or less employees. As we at YUVA Consultants offer small business admin support this shows that there is real potential for growth in offering help to small companies stretched by the demands of keeping on top of admin.
Julian offered help and support to businesses and showed that firms had a higher rate of growth and better success in raising capital by linking to Scottish Enterprise.
What made companies grow? In his opinion, ones that were efficient, innovative, invested in skills and kit, customer focused and had a global outlook – and maybe even those that had the help of YUVA Consultants!
A good and enjoyable event.