Over 90 business people attended the breakfast meeting at the Birmingham Hippodrome on 3rd March

Date added: 09/03/2011

Over 90 business people attended the monthly breakfast meeting at the Birmingham Hippodrome on 3 March. The meeting was again well attended.  The title was “you tell us “and you certainly did!  The aim was to discuss ways of making the site sustainable and also to encourage local businesses to feedback on the future.

The finditinbirmingham.com team were on the panel at the event to provide information on the site and answer some of the questions they wanted feedback on. The panel consisted of:
    
Nigel Kletz – Birmingham City Council Corporate Procurement Services Director
Neil Hopkins – Birmingham City Council Corporate Procurement Services Project Manager
Stuart Horton –Finditinbirmingham.com Project Manager
Paul Long – Marketing and Sales Manager at IceBlue Marketing & Design Ltd

Nigel opened with a presentation on ‘Shaping the future of finditinbirmingham’, giving information on the background and an overview of the website.  He then talked about
finditinbirmingham’s achievements and how statistics are looking one year on.
Including:

•    Over 8,000 members since May 2010.
•    45,000 page views a month.
•    £3.5 bn worth of supply opportunities has been posted on the site.

He then explained the challenges faced by serious budget pressures and asked the
audience, “How can we make the site sustainable in 2011?”

There were many suggestions and the participation was interesting, interactive and enthusiastic. Time was spent discussing whether a charge for registration or the breakfast meetings is the way forward.  Obviously, no decision can be made easily, but the discussions have given much food for thought!  Many aspects of the morning’s talk was around what the team can do; from encouraging more usage to making the tendering process for large contracts easier.

The question and answer session brought to light a great success story fed back during the discussion to remind us how successful the site and it's breakfast meetings have been giving business to Birmingham.  The story came from Jason Jones at Access Self Storage based in Birmingham, who have 20 years experience in the self storage industry including self, bulk and multi-site storage and archiving and document storage.  

At the ‘Health and Wellbeing’ breakfast meeting back in January, during networking, the conversation turned to business, and he spoke to a company who required 1,000 sq feet of storage space.

He has now secured a contract for approx £10k from this conversation with the possibility of further expansion.

 “The breakfast meetings are extremely relaxed and a great environment to do business.  I have only attended 3 and have already taken advantage of the networking opportunities“.