Last year, Flintloque was at Manchester Central for the Business North West (BNW) event, the largest business exhibition in the North West that attracts business leaders and entrepreneurs from all over the country. We had attended the event the year before, but this time, I attended as a VIP and Flintloque was present as a guest on the stand run by BSI (British Standards Institution) to promote their new management system standard, BS 11000: Collaborative business relationships.
On the Tuesday morning, I was privileged to join Dan Palmer, Head of Market Development at BSI, and Adrian Quayle, Managing Director of P&Q Consulting, to deliver a 45 minute seminar in the Insider Innovation Lounge on the subject of ‘Understanding the Value of Collaborative Business Relationships’. The presentation was similar to one that the three of us delivered together at the Daresbury Science and Innovation Campus on 9th September 2011, when we helped BSI to organise a launch event for part 2 of the BS 11000 Standard; the guidance notes on implementation.
The format of the presentation that we gave followed a ‘drill-down’ style: Dan dealt with the role of BSI in the creation and dissemination of Standards and why BS 11000 is important to organisations involved in procurement, Adrian presented some cases studies where outsourcing business relationships failed and pointed out where adherence to the best practice in the Standard would have prevented the failure, and I presented a ‘at the coalface’ point of view, covering how the Standard can help those individuals managing business relationships to do their jobs more effectively. The seminar created a great deal of interest and discussion, so much so that the organisers had their work cut-out clearing our attendees from the lounge at the same time as the next session’s attendees were trying to get in!
I had a very pleasant two days at Manchester Central talking to folk about management systems of various kinds (e.g., quality, medical device, environmental, relationship, etc.) and I made a host of new contacts. The two highlights for me were hearing Nigel Botterill speak (and subsequently joining his Entrepreneur’s Circle, more of this in a future blog) and giving out a couple of hundred leaflets advertising the Masterclasses that Adrian Quayle and I run on ‘Successful Business Relationships’. Interest in the latter went well beyond our expectations and now forms a major part of Flintloque’s business activity.