Events

June has been a very busy month for Friuch Consulting as we grow our practice. The blog, as a result, has suffered. I’ve only managed four posts this month (as opposed to my target – 12). I also experienced a very demoralizing drop in traffic the past four days that I need to investigate. My blog normally gets 100-200 unique visitors per day. Since Tuesday, less than 15 per day. I can’t think of a good reason why traffic would have dropped off so precipitously unless there’s something wrong with my tracking urchin. Update: I upgraded Wordpress on Tuesday and it stripped my urchin code out of my Google Analytics plugin. Doh! I’ve fixed it so we’ll see if that helps the numbers.

In the meantime, I’m going to put the blog into dormancy low gear until the rest of the team gets up to speed and can start writing more. The tone and flavour of the blog is likely to change as a result. My colleagues all have their axes to grind and favourite topics and we’re going to have a more organized editorial schedule to reflect that. This will start right around when we update the website content in early August to tell you more about our team, what we’re doing and where we’re going.

In the meantime, enjoy some sporatic postsings from me in July and look for a re-launch of the blog in August.

I am going to start exploring the possibility of setting up a one-day conference for sole proprietors and people new to consulting in Vancouver by the end of the year. There are a lot of things I’ve had to learn the hard way over the last six years and I want to pack as many of those lessons and a host of guest speakers into the event to cover topics like:

• How to survive the first 10,000 hours of your consulting business
  
• Sales and lead generation for consultants
  
• The RFP circus – how to get on the inside track and win bids
  
• Branding and marketing for sole proprietorships
  
• Social media for small consulting firms
  
• Credentials and professional development
  
• Identifying and building up equity in niche markets
  
• How to grow your firm
  

I’m throwing this out there because I want to get a sense of who is interested in coming to something like this and what kinds of topics they’d like to see covered. Networking will be a big component of this and there will also be vendors on hand to share services that can make your life as a consultant easier. I’m starting a mailing list for this conference and have bought a domain name to host the event details/registration (miniconcon.com). I’m thinking Fall, 2009 in downtown Vancouver for the timing.

If you’re interested in getting involved in this as an attendee, a speaker or a vendor that would like to have a booth at the event, please contact me.

If this event is a success, I plan to run it in other Canadian cities and possible more than once per year in Vancouver. The format I’m leaning towards is like the TED Conference [LINK] where attendees get to hear a number of 20-minute power-talks by innovative, thoughtful and experienced people. Networking will be a big part of this event and a directory of attendees and their elevator pitches will be posted on the website.

Feel free to post your suggestions or ideas in the comments section below. Other topics we should cover? Potential speakers we should look at?

That’s more than enough alliteration for one post. Last night I had the great pleasure and honour to be one of many hosts at the 25^th Simon Fraser University Outstanding Alumni Awards. The event went off very smoothly thanks to the hard work of a handful of SFU staff including Holli Redekop, Julie Saito, Nicol Lishka and too many other people to name. My job last night was to escort the lovely and talented Evaleen Jaager Roy (of Electronic Arts fame) who was receiving an award for professional achievement last night. I was on the committee that selected these winners so it was personally gratifying for me to see them up there and hear all the lovely things that were said about them. I just want to make a few comments here about each of the winners:

Dr. Richard Bruskiewich – Academic Achievement

Richard is an accomplished scientist in his own right having worked on the human genome project (amongst other things) and when David Baillie introduced him, he emphasized the significance of the achievements that Richard has made over the years. I was very, very impressed. What I was more impressed though when pushing for him to receive an award at the committee level was his own personal sacrifices to work overseas for the International Rice Research Institute in the Philippines. I believe that he passed on more lucrative positions her in North America or the EU to do work that he felt was important for the world. It’s obvious that he cares deeply about his family too. I had a chance to speak with him briefly after the awards and his family was one of the things that we talked about. The presenter that introduced him was obviously very emotional about him winning the award and I was a bit choked up myself.

Ms. Evaleen Jaager Roy – Professional Achievement

As I mentioned, I got to escort Evaleen and her family throughout the event and what a delight it was. Evaleen’s son, Steffan, was a lot of fun and a good sport throughout the event despite having just come out of a major volleyball competition that day. Everyone speaks very highly of Evaleen. Her professional achievements are clearly superior. However, I was thrilled to learn that she also has a serious philanthropic streak as well. Dr. Gerri Sinclair (a very well known player in BC’s science and technology community) introduced her and spent a lot of time talking about the contributions that Evaleen made to the formation of the Master of Digital Media program at the Great Northern Way campus in Vancouver [link].

In addition to helping push through the development of this program and this campus, Evaleen also ensured that young women and the disadvantaged would have the opportunity to learn at this new high tech centre. In one case, they gave a scholarship to a young homeless person who was living under a bridge and that person now has a budding career as a digital art director here in Vancouver. This earned her the unofficial title “VP of Angels”. She’s a great person and I was honoured to have met her.

Dr. Gabor Mate – Service to the Community

Dr. Mate is an intimidating, sharp-witting and sharp-tongued guy. He’s authored many books on the topic of the psychology of addiction and is currently working on a new book. I most appreciated his comments about his experience at SFU in the late 1960s (when the school was brand new) and how radical it was. In an age where I fear a dilution of that raw spirit that gives SFU its distinct character, it was nice to harken back to what makes SFU special. While SFU President Michael Stevenson seemed apologetic about our new Fine Arts campus going into the old Woodwards site [link], Dr. Mate – a long-standing champion of the Downtown East Side – applauded the project which will include 200 units of social housing for the impoverished residents of the area. I wish I’d had a chance to talk with Gabor but he was surrounded by a throng of admirers after the event.

Dr. Jennifer Allen Simons – Service to the Community

Jennifer Simons was introduced as a “kickboxer”, a patron of the arts and a passionate advocate for nuclear disarmament. My good friend Shauna Sylvester from Canada’s World [link] gave a lovely, glowing introduction and emphasized the kind of magnetism that Dr. Simons has when she attends these international summits to discuss nuclear weapon proliferation. Dr. Simons was clearly moved by receiving the award and took time to talk about the progress of her fight against nuclear proliferation. She also mentioned that she has a new initiative under way. You can check it out at at globalzero.org. I wish, like Shuana, that I’d had the benefit of knowing Dr. Simons all these years. It’s also reminded me that I need to spend more time with Shauna since I’ve always valued her friendship and advice.

Click here to read the award profiles of all the winners last night.

On Tuesday night, I attended the Vancouver Enterprise Forum [link] and the topic was “Social Networking Tools for Business Development” featuring a panel of Social Networking professionals. I had assumed that what this panel of social media illuminati would be talking about was how to leverage social meda to do business development. Instead, we were hit with a chorus of “privacy is dead” and “you need to cultivate a business appropriate presence online”. Well no shit, Sherlock!

The only real nugget of useful insight that came out of this panel was the fact that Twitter is emerging as a viable B2B PR platform. Your tweets are searchable through a variety of tools like Filtrbox [link] or TweetGrid [link]. For example, if you’re looking to hire a graphic designer, you post a tweet about looking for a graphic designer and you’ll probably get some responses.

The real question that I had going into this event was “how can an organization use social media for business development”. I left feeling it was unanswered. Here’s my take on it:

Social media, is by its nature, bottom-up. For an organization to try and force a dialogue online via social media top-down is like trying to be cool. Nine times out of ten – you’re going to look like a tit. That could be why my question was avoided – there isn’t an answer.

We heard three different perspectives on how to leverage the tools for personal productivity and exposure.

Naisan Geula, WebTrends

- has been online since before Al Gore invented it /rolls eyes
- built up a personal brand and has people who follow his tweets and his blog musings.
- no word on if this has helped bus dev at Web Trends.

Colleen Nystedt, MovieSet

- leverages LinkedIn and Facebook like an online rolodex to track contacts.
- encourages employees to blog and tweet about what film projects they’re working on as long as they don’t disclose the location.
- thinks paid version of LinkedIn is a ripoff.
- no word on how social media aides her company beyond having a live rolodex.

Tim Swanson, Corporate Recruiters Ltd.

- he uses it as a business intelligence tool much like I do.

In my opinion, “social media” is no more a business development tool than a pen, a phone or a Rolodex. It isn’t going to do business development for you but as a personal productivity tool, it works just fine. I was an early adopter or LinkedIn (been on it for over six years) and I’ve used it to find people that I need to talk to and do some background checks on people but has it brought business rolling in the door? No. I do that with my face to face interactions with people. Social media doesn’t replace that. I agree with the panellists thay getting your personal brand online in order is a good thing but I also think you need to keep it real too.

TransLink – the regional transportation authority for British Columbia’s South Coast (Vancouver and the surrounding region) takes a lot of grief over a lot of issues. In addition to being responsible for Metro Vancouver’s public transit services (bus, skytrain, commuter rail and seabus), TransLink is responsible for maintaining and operating the region’s major roads. On January 18, 2009, a section of one of the busiest bridges in Metro Vancouver (the Pattullo Bride) caught fire, closing the bridge to public access [READ].

This was a major catastrophe for commuters. Surrey is the 11th largest city in Canada (with close to a half million people) and the Pattullo Bridge is one of only three bridges heading West out of Surrey into the rest of Metro Vancouver. It sees 80,000 commuters cross it every day. Talk about a nightmare for commuters. I had to head into Vancouver the day after the closure and it took me nearly 2 hours to make a 50km trip – a trip that normally takes me 45 minutes.

When TransLink announced the closure – their best estimate was that the bridge would be closed for 4-6 weeks while they replaced the wooden section of this 72 year-old bridge with a new steel structure. The impact of this closure on Surrey is hard to describe. “Chaos” is one word. To their credit, TransLink immediately responded by adding more Skytrain cars to the rush hour time slots, new temporary “park and ride” facilities for commuters coming in from the Fraser Valley and more express bus runs to take commuters to the Skytrain. I was very impressed with their response.

Today, TransLink re-opened the Pattullo Bridge – only eight days after it was closed due to the fire. Apparently, they found a pre-made steel span left over from the work they’ve been doing on the Pitt River Bridge (another much-needed project) and were able to use that on the Pattullo Bridge. I am absolutely shocked and amazed that they managed to get this repair in place so quickly and restore normal traffic flow. On behalf of Surrey and Metro Vancouver residents, I want to thank TransLink for pulling off this feat. I’ll never underestimate you guys again.

I get called upon to speak to undergraduate students about career-related matters on a regular basis. In the next month, I’ll be making two presentations that, if you’re an undergrad student at UBC or SFU, you might be interested in. Here are the details:

2009 SFU Leadership Summit

2009 SFU Leadership Summit, “Layers of Leadership”, will be held on Saturday, January 24, 2009, from 8:30am-4:45pm at SFU’s Burnaby Campus. [MORE DETAILS]

The hour-long talk that I will be giving will be on risk and its role in leadership and personal development. The point that I am going to try and drive home is that true leaders are those who break away from the pack, take risks (not gambling risks) and push things forward. Most of the people in the audience are going to be Generation Y-types who (if current books on the topic are anything to go by) are more risk-averse than GenXers. Specifically, this generation seems less likely to “go it alone”. I think the ability to “go it alone” at times is what sets leaders apart from followers.

Should be an interesting talk in any case. I did a talk at their summit last year on personal branding and the impact that has on your career.

Enterprize 2009

Founded in 2001 by Commerce undergrad students at UBC, Enterprize is an undergraduate entrepreneur conference as well as Canada’s largest student-run business plan competition. This year expects over 450 delegates, competitors, community leaders, and entrepreneurs from across Canada. Day 1 – on February 6th – I will be giving a talk entitled “From Student to Startup” [READ].

I’ll be talking to this group about some of the key skills, lessons learned and mistakes that I made in transitioning from a student to a business owner over the past six years. I’ve also had the benefit of learning from many of my clients with startups. I’m slightly less qualified to speak on this topic than other people that I know but with my looks, I don’t think anyone else had a chance.

So, not sure how many of you out there are undergrad students at UBC or SFU but if you’re interested in coming to see me talk, I’d love to talk with you at either of these events.

Update [September 10]: The party is officially full to capacity.

EDIT: PARTY DATE HAS BEEN CHANGED TO SEPTEMBER 12TH DUE TO A SCHEDULING CONFLICT

It’s official. On September 10, 2008, CERN in Geneva is going to turn on the Large Hadron Collider, potentially destroying the entire world. Granted, it’s only a 5% chance (according to some) but there’s still a chance. I know there’s a lot of interest in the CERN LHC because I get a lot of people reading my CERN posts. That naturally led me to the conclusion that I needed to throw a CERN LHC Armageddon party.

Click here to see who’s coming.

See previous articles I’ve written about the CERN LHC and the impending apocalypse:

Could the Large Hadron Collider at CERN Destroy Our World?

CERN Update

Here’s the drill:

On September 12, 2008 (starting at 6pm) you, me and a bunch of other meddling kids are going to go out and celebrate our impending doom.
FAQ:

1. Why haven’t you picked a venue?

A: Because I don’t know how many people are coming and that makes a big difference on the type of venue I should book.

2. If I RSVP now, will you let me know which venue its going to be held at eventually?

A: Yes. I will e-mail you two weeks before the event and tell you which venue (definitely somewhere in Vancouver) and give you an opportunity to back out.

3. Will there be t-shirts?

A: Yes. I will be providing commemorative t-shirts to mark the end of the world as we know it. Please let me know what size cotton t-shirt you wear when you RSVP.

So, if you’re wondering what kind of party this is going to be… let me give you a taste:

See you there!!! Don’t forget to vote on what we’re going to do during the party below or in the sidebar.

[poll id="6"]