If there is something that every couple concerns about, it is that your wedding is tiring. In this article, we will provide all the required suggestions to make your wedding beautiful as well as for everyone to have a remarkable event.
Introduces Visitors Bear in mind that a wedding brings together two groups of good friends and family members who do not know. We advise that prior to the wedding event, make some getaways and invite participants from both sides to share a good minute and start to be seen. So at the time of the wedding event and be identified as well as greeted, the ambience ends up being extra relaxed and more festive. Assimilation produces an atmosphere. In this way, the young can hang out and incorporate means with various other guests. The tables make guests feel with their family members and prevent assimilation. Do not allow the companies to go unfilled. Try to have mixed drinks and treats, which keeps your visitors delighted and not tired causes and puts them in a bad mood. The concepts are advised tiny empanels, skewers, macaroni, cheese. Transport Service If your event is held in a remote area, make certain you have transportation for your visitors. In this method, no more waiting for hrs to relax and also go, delighting in more of the wedding celebration. Home entertainment Try to organize some fun numbers. It may be a series of videos of the couple, visitor messages for the couple, a mariachi band or music you like. By doing this, raise the spirit and the focus of your guests. No question, this element will certainly depend greatly on your budget plan. Put a time frame on Tribute. Generally, in the toast enjoyed, ones are most likely to desire really good wishes as well as cozy words. If done too long can be boring. Limits the variety of speakers as well as do modest, in this manner every person can grab the celebration. Songs If you are hiring a DJ, make certain you pass the music your guests like to enjoy. Often, individual preferences are commonly different from average, and they may taste, so consider your guests. Candy Bar Make room for your guests will certainly delight in desserts, desserts as well as deal with. This will create them to relocate through the area and are a lot more enjoyable. In the evening it's suitable as it is when desserts are extra appealing. With these suggestions, you will absolutely be fun and event activities will certainly generate your visitors. However, the wedding videographer and photographer can provide the greatest happiness to the couple when recording the wedding. They do not subtract interest and also attempt to be loosened up and also have enjoyable! In this means, the young can go to hang out and also incorporated means with other visitors. If your event is held in a remote location, make sure you have transport for your guests. In this method, increase the spirit as well as the focus of your visitors. If you are hiring a DJ, make certain you pass the music your visitors like to delight in. Wedding event videographer and photographer, visit weddingtales.ca where can provide the pair's greatest happiness when recording a wedding celebration day.
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There is nothing better than helping a client through the provision of a service that you just know is going to help them. It is a case of all the interests being aligned. I remember watching the movie “In Good Company” (to be fair not a brilliant movie, but a great sales scene). In the movie, Denis Quaid is the senior salesperson teaching a young up-start how to sell. They get a really good sale and Denis seems very pleased because the customer has got a good deal. “You believe in this, don’t you?” asks the young up-start. “Of course, why else would you do it?” replies a slightly startled Denis. There is real truth in this and yet we all come across businesses and salespeople where you sense the objective is just to make money rather than seeing making money as a by-product of providing a really useful service that adds value. The business I have recently started up and am now focusing much of my attention on is www.springleads.com and I do not mean for this blog to come across as an advert for this business, but I want to use it to explain exactly what I mean by alignment.
My background is in sales and my career break came through my cold-calling efforts at PricewaterhouseCoopers. I was very good at it and went around the country training others across the firm on cold calling. It is something that I enjoy enormously and have a passion for. With all of the mentoring I have done recently, I know that the big issue many start-ups face is having to make many cold calls just to find the few customers that would be interested in talking to them. The most effective salesperson in a startup tends to be the CEO, and yet the most precious resource they have is their time. Cold-calling for them is not a good use of their time. www.springleads.com provides that service for them and for any other company that needs a large number of calls being made. So how did we set about differentiating between other call centres? Again through understanding the pain that start-ups have, we were able to realize that having a setup fee and a minimum order number of hours acted as a barrier to many cash-strapped start-ups. As such, we set up a cost structure where there would be no setup fee and a flat £15 per hour. Of course, this is a plug for the business, but I hope it illustrates that when you are starting a business, it is important that you have (or you rapidly acquire) knowledge about the problem you claim to be solving. The other lesson is that you have to make money from the activity whilst still providing an enhanced service. So your cost structure has to demonstrate not just the needs you have – but also the needs of your client. Ensure your personality and experience are aligned with your business and that most critically your business structure is aligned with the needs of your customers. This has been a strange week for me. BBC Breakfast has been running a series on Happiness and what leads to it. The conclusions seem to be that people are happier through showing acts of kindness and spending time with each other rather than through accumulating money or assets. This week I took part in Seedcamp for the second time. It was exhausting and does involve giving up a lot of your time – and none of the mentors get paid for this. I also have to say I am feeling very happy right now (despite having the usual problems that all of us have to fight daily). It was only when I saw the conclusion on BBC this morning did I make the connection between the way I felt and the fact that I had given something back to the entrepreneurial ecosystem. There are too many ‘grubby’ things out there where lots of people of little or no talent try to make money off the back of incredibly hard-working and risk-taking entrepreneurs and it makes me angry when I hear some of the stories around this. Entrepreneurs are the new rock stars of the moment and there are so many organizations that claim to exist to support them. Unless you are in the business of investing or mentoring, you are not helping. It is as simple as that. And if you are in the business of investing, be clear, honest and transparent about your cost structure.
Seedcamp has created a great eco-system where lots of mentors give up their time for free. The companies pay nothing to be there and benefit from the advice given. I was able to mentor a few companies, and I was pleased with the feedback (not about me, but the Seedcamp process). There is nothing more disheartening than to give your advice to people who don’t want it (even though they ask for it!). This is what I as a mentor thought was brilliant about Seedcamp companies – they all wanted advice and took it on board. This compares with two companies that asked for advice and did not turn up for pre-booked meetings that I met through a different forum (still not had an apology from one of them!) Back to my main point, I would encourage an yone with experience in the digital space to try and get involved in Seedcamp as a mentor. It is a great experience, you will meet great people and companies who will value your input. And as the BBC proved this week, giving your time to this will make you happy – I promise you. My last post led to me getting a phone call from one of the best Angels I know on the London scene at the moment making some very important points. I promised that I would write a blog about the points that came out of the conversation. 1. The importance of tax considerations. One of the big drawbacks of using loan instruments (such as convertible notes) is that it does not attract EIS relief. EIS is a very big deal for investors and given the likelihood of failure, for a very good reason. And of course, with tax increases, the potential upside EIS very attractively. 2. From a security point of view, convertible loan notes only make sense if the underlying business you are investing in has assets. For example, investing in a company in the digital space will mean that upon a liquidation event, you will probably not receive any proceeds from disposal even though you have a ‘loan’. 3. A conversion formula only makes sense if the conversion ‘event’ is in the short term (within 18 months). The example given was the following An angel investor puts £100,000 into a pure start-up in the digital space. The investment is made at a 30% discount to the next liquidity event convertible loan note formula. At this stage, there is nothing but a business plan. No revenues to speak of etc. The business quickly grows and does not require any more funding. The business is then sold after five years for £5m. The investor then receives the £100,000 note back along with 30% extra. There is no conversion to take place as the shares are all being bought. A 30% return on a very high-risk investment when there was nothing to back seems very low. It will grate even more when the founder walks away with £4.9m! You would agree that this does not seem like a fair split of the risks and rewards. My colleague also uses an interesting cap and collar mechanism. This mechanism ensures that both the company and the investor are protected on the downside and the upside. Agreeing on a valuation figure is always problematic in a start-up situation and much time and energy can be wasted on that. One interesting instrument I came across recently was a convertible loan note with a future valuation formula agreed. Commonly, convertible loan notes work like this;
An investor makes a loan to a company and earns an agreed % of interest each year. The loan will then either be redeemable after an agreed time frame or be converted into equity at that time at an agreed price. The instrument is very flexible and you can have many different variables (what is done with the interest, the number of years etc). This still leaves the problem of valuation to be agreed though. One of the loan notes I came across in Canada deals with this problem fairly neatly. The valuation is at an agreed discount (30%) on the next fundraising round. The benefit of this solution is that it allows valuation to be left till a future date when there should be some metric based valuation dependent on performance. Another instrument I came across was a redeemable preference share. This acts like a convertible note but allows for massive upside in the case of a sale of the business. The example I came across was that an investment of $1m was made and this would equate to 20% of the business but would be treated as a loan. If (when) the business was sold, the $1m would be repaid and 20% of the net sale proceeds would go to the equity holders as well. (So if the business sold for $10m, the Noteholders ($1m) would get $2.8m ($1m + $1.8m (20% of $9m))). So although the business has doubled in value, the noteholders would get 2.8x the money invested. I think these instruments will increasingly be used in the next two or three years as angel investors look to protect themselves against high valuations and to ensure that they get a good upside for the higher level of risk they are being asked to undertake (in terms of other competing financial assets). Be interested in hearing from start-ups about their thoughts on these instruments. I was at a great function last week run by the London Business Angel Association. www.bbaa.org.uk It was an opportunity for businesses to pitch to business angels. It was fantastic and I met some really good businesses run by very passionate and talented people. Honestly, sometimes I think I am such a lucky guy – I think this line of work keeps you very young as you are working with people who are saying no to accepting the status quo and are following the dreams despite knowing that statistically, the chances are against them. Trust me; this keeps you young, alive and energized! Sorry, that was a bit of a sidetrack. As I said it was a great event but may I give some advice to anyone who is thinking about pitching to investors? (or anyone). Make sure that after no more than two minutes; your audience understands what it is you do! I kid you not, 12 minutes into a 15-minute pitch I had no idea what two of the six businesses pitching did and therefore how they made money. But I did learn lots about digital conversion technologies and how Siebel was a really good database (the competition)!
I am a big fan of the Elevator pitch. The phrase comes from the USA and the story behind it (I have no idea if it is true) is as follows. A guy was trying to get his pitch across to some wealthy backers in New York. He was struggling to get an appointment to see any of them – but then waited for them in the lobby of their offices. He would get in the lift (or elevator as our cousins across the pond call it) and then have until the elevator got to the 7th Floor to sell the business idea – and he succeeded in generating enough interest for the backers to agree to meet him for a proper chat. The thing I like about these pitches is that they force you to be clear and focused and get to the point quickly. It is a good discipline to get into with lots of different aspects of your life. Before important meetings, you should always get into a situation where you can summarise the outcome you would like within 90 seconds. Remember you are just trying to convey the basics and why somebody should learn more. I do have to attend many meetings – but I find that the optimum time for a meeting is 20 minutes provided people are clear and concise. People tend to waffle – and bore you with stuff you just don’t need to know – and if you do you can always read a business plan or ask questions. When I do ask a question, I don’t want the reply to be “that is a good question”, or “it is not as simple as that” – I just would like the question to be answered clearly and in a language that I understand. Like most investors, I think I am intelligent enough to understand things if they are explained properly. My failure to understand something is often a reflection of the person doing the explaining! We see it on The Apprentice every week – the candidates waffling for ages rather than give a straight answer. I just feel that as Winston Churchill once lamented the art of brevity is being lost. Please, let’s bring it back. |
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