Buildenterprise’s Blog

I’ve just heard about this Social Enterprise West Midlands trade fair. it takes place on Tuesday 10th February, is free to attend and looks like a fantastic day. find out more at www.socialenterprisewm.org.uk

Wow! a great turn out despite it being held outside of term time. Thanks to our speakers and all those who attended.

The event started with a talk on starting building a website for free. Si covered the technical side, Rich the design side and Me the money making side.

Next I introduced the concept of starting a business for a fiver. The idea being you spend £5 on getting a business off the ground and although starting a business for a fiver is unlikely to make you rich it will generate some cash and more importantly allow you to teach yourself a thing or two. Various possible tried and tested models were presented; the business card/service model; the ebay model; the creative skill model.

My own idea was from the creative skill model, my plan being to start selling branded canvases to build up some revenue for re-investment. I started with one canvas which cost £3.99 to make (paint and canvas) which I then sold for £10, allowing me to buy 4 more canvases to sell. I quickly sold 2 to friends giving me enough to buy a domainname and web hosting for a year. The plan now is to sell the other two and move the design onto t-shirts and sell them too. After which the website will be launched and I will concentrate on generating traffic to my site…

Lastly we heard a highly inspirational story form one of the www.copyfox.co.uk team about the time he another one of his team travelled Romania for a weekend spending no money. They met many colourful characters along the way, who despite the language barrier helped them survive the weekend. The trip was about surviving outside their comfort zone and I’m sure everyone will agree it was a highly inspirational story. I urge you all to try something similar…

The night then ended with the usually meal and once again everyone raved about the great food provided by Bohemia, big shout out to Ross, Andrew and Glen.  www.eatbohemia.co.uk

I thought postering Selly shops was a bit too easy, it seems that most have now either been taken down or have been covered by other events. I know for sure that the majority have been taken down, from take aways. I believe there are two possible reasons for this.

1. Our members are seen as potential competition

2. We’re advertising a Free Buffet and Bohemia, which crappy fast food places see as competition.

Better leave the Cafe Bistro and Free Buffet text out of posters next time.

Paradise circus

‘an island of love and friendship for Brum-ish blogging, web and social media types’

The strangest thing happened over lunch, Simon asked me to come to the monthly Birmingham Bloggers meeting. ‘Woe, that’s weird!’ was my immediate response.

Thing was in the morning while doing my mad scientist shizzle of playing with piranha solution, gold and molecules, I was wondering round my mind. Thinking of this whole blogshpere thing, which I’m just starting to get into, I thought wouldn’t it be great if Birmingham Bloggers regularly met up. After all a meeting full of bloggers would surely be a meeting full of interesting conversation. I never thought I’d actually get to go blogger meeting

Unfortunately Si had to cancel so had to just get myself down there and meet some bloggers and bloggers I met. All were really interesting people, all of them blog and everyone was really friendly. If you blog come along, if you don’t I’m sure you’ll still enjoy finding out about everyone Else’s. check their website www.paradisecircus.com

I’ve spent the week putting up posters and flyer’s, finished off today with the last ones.

Promotion in Uni is hard! For legal reasons precious email lists aren’t accessible. So you have to rely on flyers and Posters, but there are strict rules. posters can go on notice boards but finding a place to put them is usually a right mission. Then you have to move posters so they don’t overlap. I noticed some that were over current adverts, which I thought was a bit wrong, I feel far to guilty to do so not just for the advertiser but also the customer who may miss out. I wanted to break the rules, I wanted to rebel and put them everywhere, even thought about placing one in a pay 2 advertise here frame but thought I better not, last thing I want to do is get banned from campus.

Posters and flyers are all around Selly Oak and Uni now. Selly Oak is easy to do, the shop keepers are all so cool about it. Big shout out to all, hardly anyone said no and if they did there was good reason.

some pics from our adventure

 Saturday October saw me and Rich hit town with the message of Build Enterprise… Meeting early afternoon we fueled up on some of them delicious Krispie doughnuts from selferidges. If you haven’t tried them yet do so. Waiting out the ridiculously sized queue is worth it.

Loaded up on sugar we headed to Millennium point. Bombing bluetac-ed flyer’son the way. First off  we sneakily left some in the, futuristic apple mac clad, Matthew Boulton computer room. Hoping some budding designers would get join Building Enterprise. We got chatting to a French Photographer, who clearly had some authority within the room. He working on the ‘field of light’ project. http://www.designcommunity.com/forums/post-3281410.html. After hearing what they were up to I decided to confess to the flyer drop and invite him along, which also gave me the chance to tell the 20 other people in the room. Moving upstairs we got some contact details for the Birmingham City University from a student receptionist, herself working on a band management service.

We then left millenuim point and headed to the Matthew Boulton college building. Inside we had to comfort a security guard who was very good at his job. He had 1 thing to do, get us out in a very polite manner while being as unhelpful as possible. We manged to stall him in his job long enough to sneakily drop some flyer’sin a good place just under his nose.

Moving onto Aston Uni where we might have struck gold. After hitting the common rooms of a few halls we stumbled into the business school. We played it cool and manged to find the lectures offices, flyering each door in the hope they would tell their students. We even found the Deans office and gave him some posters with a letter pleading for help in promotion, I hope he appreciated it. Then on our way out we got quizzed by at the entrance by a lady who then offered to put some flyer’s out in the student rooms. Then before we left we manged to invite someone who seemed very eager to join Build Enterprise.

We then moved on to town, continuing to bomb and hiding poster in Oasis Becuase it felt standard. We paind a visit to the council office who couldn’t help us but suggested we meet our local councilor. Finallyb we hit the independent clothes shops. Disorder, http://www.disorderboutique.com/ an shinning example of an independent boutique was really helpful and offered to help the cause. we hit the others getting a good response since we aim to encouarge what they are…Its great to know Build Enterprise could help encourage and support a more independent capitalist society. Death to the standardisation of the high street, its Gstar army and mindless consumerism! The Free Enterprise revolution is here!

After this great end to the day we headed for the Chinnese Cafe for dinner with Richard’s father. A meeting that came with a fair share of suprise, influence and hope for Build Enterprise.

In the SPEED training of the great wet summer I had been given some advice and opinions about my brand image (logo and website). The basis was that the first brand image was wrong, It did give some of the messages we wanted, such as young and vibrant, but it said nothing about people and networking. Furthermore it was rather amateur. With this in mind I set about redesigning the brand image, although unfortunately my artistic ideas out weigh my ability and I couldn’t create what i wanted to, never the less I came up with a more suitable logo and website which would all be changed in the end of our Indian(ish) summer.

Both the logo and website were designed in Microsoft office and publisher gave the HTML code massively overcomplicated, which in turn made it difficult to manage online. Hence, after our event ‘First Ventures’ my good friend Richard Baddeley offered to redesign it, on the condition that he could also re-brand to give a much more professional look, check out Richards portfolio at www.baddeley.be/portfolio2008.pdf. and the final logo at www.buildenterprise.co.uk where you can also see the events poster Richard created. Rich is currently building us a new website