It was our pleasure to recently host and speak at The Family Business Practice’s first physical networking event in more than 18 months. Above all, it was brilliant to see people face to face and interact in a natural, organic way. Having the beautiful Malvern hills as our backdrop certainly was a nice bonus as well.
Our Commercial Director, Andrea Borwell-Fox delivered an informative presentation centered around digital transformation, and how technology can make your business more efficient. The presentation gave examples of the ground up custom developed software solutions our team have built in order to solve challenging issues for various organisations, demonstrating how we have taken big data problems and created engaging visual solutions.
Andrea, also spoke about the many tools and ways of working that can promote efficiency and collaboration on projects. Tools like Microsoft 365, which encompasses a whole raft of applications. Many of which, a lot of businesses are either still unaware of or are not yet using. The chances are, those applications are included in the subscription the business already has. Brilliant tools like Planner, which has been a game changer for our business, and many others. An incredibly simple but effective way of managing tasks, and tracking progress of projects. This is how we allocate and manage tasks within our marketing team.
Peter Roper also spoke about the future of managing a business community, such as The Family Business Practice. As we know, the business landscape has changed in the last 2 years, and some people have adopted different ways of working. Many people still feel that you can’t beat a physical event or meeting, for that personal interaction and collaboration. There is also a real feeling that business will continue to adopt virtual events and meetings to a further extent than was the case back in 2019.
In all, the group felt that virtual isn’t going away entirely, but finding the right balance between physical events and virtual events was key. It was generally agreed, you can’t do better than face to face interaction, but that virtual events and meetings also have their place, particularly where significant travel would otherwise be involved, saving participants many hours of travel time, increasing geographical reach, increasing a wider participation, along with doing our bit for the environment by reducing unnecessary travel and lowering our carbon footprint.
It's certainly an interesting time for all businesses, and we would love to hear your thoughts on the future direction of events, meetings and communication methods that will be used in the coming years, feel free to get in touch.