It’s been great to be back out meeting people face-to-face for client meetings since the great unpleasantness (which all seems a long time ago now). I think you can forget with the proliferation of Teams and Zoom, just how important it is for us to do that. But as good as these tools are for both productivity and time management, we can neglect the power of meeting new people face-to-face and also celebrating their achievements. So I went to the FSB Awards & Networking event in April.

With that in mind I’d started to get back out doing traditional networking. A time-consuming aspect to my marketing and not always a valuable one. However, I’d joined the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) for a few of their benefits, and started to attend their networking events. The latest being the FSB Awards and Networking event in Cardiff.

Last week was their annual awards for the Cardiff area and it was motivational to see such impressive organisations thriving. Congratulations to all! 

Further after attending a few meetings, I was invited to talk about how design can affect the efficacy of your marketing. We covered a number of topics to help attendees spot some aspects of good design, but also to show how design can really make a tangible difference to their visual communications. We won’t cover the whole presentation here, but one of the aspects that everyone can learn quickly is covered in this blog about visual hierarchy (we’ll pop more on over time…). It was lovely to have a load of questions after the presentation, hopefully it was helpful to a few there that day.

But what’s impressed me most about the networking arranged by the FSB, has been the number of genuinely good contacts I’ve made—and further—the new business I’ve gained. 

It really has been great to get out there and meet new people face-to-face, get off the video conference occasionally and make real connections that also lead to real business. Yes, it is time consuming and therefore has a reasonable time cost attached to it, but don’t forget how powerful those human connections really are, and how much more meaningful they can be when we meet face-to-face.

Jeff

Caffeine Creative are based near Cardiff and can help with graphic design, web development, branding and more. Talk to us, we’d love to chat.