Networking gets a bad rap, because it’s often poorly facilitated. Creating a space for networking that is both results-driven and human is one of Sara Osterholzer’s superpowers.

Sara is an impact entrepreneur, startup mentor, and Entrepreneur in Residence at the University of Sussex. She’s also the co-founder of the Good Business Club, a community for entrepreneurs who want to align people and planet with profit.

The Good Business framework

These are questions you can ask of your business to help evaluate the positive impact you’re having. For an in-depth look, take the Good Business Quiz.

• What impact are you having on the people who work for you, or in your business?
• Where are your clients in their ethical journey?
• What impact is your supply chain having?
• What is your offering? Is it more sustainable or ethical than the alternative?
• What is the impact you have on a local level, or within your community?
• What is the impact you’re having on the environment?

Some things to consider

• If your business can’t sustain itself, then it can’t have the impact you want.
• Doing good is a long-term aim. If it feels tricky in the short-term but your intentions are good, give yourself a break.
• Networking is a long game.
• A community is not a place (a Slack workspace or an email list or a Facebook group). It’s a collection of people who think differently and want many different things, but are aligned around a common purpose or shared interest.
• Welcoming and onboarding community members individually takes more time, but it’s likely to provide more value to them, and reduce churn.

Links

• Connect with Sara on LinkedIn
• The Good Business Club
• Atomic Habits, by James Clear
• Pledge 1%
• B1G1
• Nick Pomeroy’s appearance on Ear Brain Heart

It’s easier to market ethically when starting a business from scratch, but any business new or old can put ethics at the heart of what they do. That’s one of the key findings Chris and Jen discovered when they started helping businesses with ethical marketing.

Chris Thornhill and Jen Bayford formed Growth Animals to help business grow their bottom-line and their impact. But ethics isn’t something that can be added in later – it relies on a company culture that’s far easier to instil at the beginning than to change later.

That doesn’t mean that legacy businesses can’t take a new ethical stance, but they often face challenges around authenticity, and avoiding “greenhushing” (or the perception that a company might be greenwashing).

Some things to consider

• When considering social media channels, think about the value you can offer, not just the size of the megaphone.
• Do your values run the grain of your company, or are they just lacquered on?
• If the Internet were a country, it would be the seventh largest polluter in the world.
• Organisations should look at the good they’re already doing – or want to do – in practical terms, before seeking accreditation.
• Too much artificial scarcity erodes trust with the customer.
• Don’t wait until you’re squeaky-clean to start a campaign with ethics in mind.

Links

• Connect with Jen on LinkedIn
• Connect with Chris on LinkedIn
• Growth Animals
• The Progressive Leader’s Guide to Ethical Marketing (PDF)
• The Social Dilemma
• DFS advert from the 90s
• Atomic Habits, by James Clear
• Take the Growth Animals quiz

Everyone’s vying for our attention on LinkedIn. So how can you stand out without simply shouting louder?

For content marketing expert Kate Clarke, the key is writing authentically, as yourself, for exactly the type of person you want to reach. So rather than creating more content or chasing the algorithm, it’s about writing, recording, or live-streaming what occurs to you that can resonate with the people you want to work with.

Key takeaways

• Good writing starts by knowing the audience. Then bring in your values and your story.
• Start your content creation journey with video or a live stream. From that, you can generate a blog post, a podcast episode, and more.
• People buy from people they share values with.
• It’s important to set boundaries when speaking with an authentic voice, so you can let people in… but not too far in.
• Don’t be afraid of repeating yourself.
• Some level of automation or scheduling is necessary to help busy people get their messages out. But remember to ask yourself “is this content valuable?”
  • This can also be hugely beneficial if you have a biological cycle that impacts how visible you want to be.
• The best ways to bring people into the “know” stage of “know, like, trust” is to be visible. Buy ads (if that feels relevant), go to networking events, pitch to guest on podcasts, build partnerships.

George Kao’s three-step process for content development

1. Start with informal content – something you can record while walking the dog.
2. Take that piece and work it into something long-form, like a blog post or YouTube video.
3. Combine the pieces that have worked best into a course or a book.

Links

• Connect with Kate on LinkedIn
• Work with Kate
• Authentic Content Marketing: Build an Engaged Audience for Your Personal Brand Through Integrity & Generosity, by George Kao
• Answer the Public
• Focusmate

We have a limited amount of self-discipline each day. So how you use what you have is crucial. Robbie Swale started writing a blog post every week on the train in-between stops.

What started as 12 minutes every week ended up as an 80,000-word book. Robbie is now three books into a four book series about how to start a project, keep it going, and create the conditions for great work.

Key takeaways

• Confidence comes from the actions you take, not the other way around.
• Similarly, the mindset to take action rarely just appears. We need to take small steps to build up that mindset.
• If you want to define yourself as “the type of person who does X”, you can’t ever be that person without taking the first step.
• Life will always get in the way. How can you leverage your practice so that it’s resilient in those times?
• Build the rep of recommitting when you lose your streak.
• Raise the activation energy for the tasks you don’t want to do, and lower the activation energy for the tasks you do.

Links

• Connect with Robbie on LinkedIn
• Check out Robbie’s books
• The 12-Minute Method Podcast
• The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles, by Steven Pressfield
• Big Magic: How to Live a Creative Life, and Let Go of Your Fear, by Elizabeth Gilbert
• You need 3 types of confidence – Rich Litvin
• Tim Ferris’s podcast gear
• Contours of Courageous Parenting: Tilting Towards Better Decisions, by Karena de Souza
• Lead. Learn. Change. by David Reynolds
• W Somerset Maugham

Running a small business, especially solo, can be isolating, stressful, and frankly triggering. Nick Pomeroy knows that all too well, which is why he’s vocal in encouraging more of us to talk about our mental health.

Nick took the solo path after heading up a design team. And although he felt supported and cared-for by his previous employer, he’d only begin to realise how stressed he’d become after working for himself.

Things to consider

• Letting someone know you’re struggling doesn’t mean you’re being a burden.
• Someone close to you may have seen the signs of stress or burnout before you’d acknowledged them.
• For Nick, if he’s working late, something’s gone wrong in planning.
• When you consider that being a solopreneur means being good at your job and also at running a small business, feeling like an imposter might not seem quite so outlandish.
• Find your own contentment point for work and life.
• We have to move past “hustle” culture and the idea that men need to “man up”.

Links

• Connect with Nick on LinkedIn
• Background – Nick’s design consultancy
• Caring for your mental health while running a business – Nick’s article for Mind Leeds
• A retrospective on depression – Nick’s company blog post
• A write-up on Muse’s Unsustainable
• Third law of thermodynamics
• Sisyphus
• Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs
• Why Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is wrong

Humans have a hard time understanding that others don’t see the world the way we do. This naive realism causes us to make assumptions that create distance between us and the people we want to serve.

Tamsen Webster is a TEDx speaker, communications expert, and author of the book Find Your Red Thread, which helps people communicate big ideas through cognitive empathy.

Things to consider

• Communication has to be sent and received in order for it to be successful. We tend to spend too much time sending messages, and not focusing on how they’re received.
• Rather than fit our worldview into someone else’s, we need to understand how their worldview informs their decisions.
• As great as our ideas might be, our audiences don’t know that yet. And simply repeating how great it is over and over again isn’t going to convince them.
• Write more pitches in a TL;DR fashion. Make them skimmable.
• Our ideas are almost never for “everyone”, only for those that share the same worldview as us.
• Find the world beliefs that support your success at an endeavour, rather than focusing on the limiting beliefs that hold you back.

Questions to ask to help establish cognitive empathy

• How is our audience thinking about the problem we’re posing?
• How do they see the world?
• What are the beliefs that are leading them to the behaviour, feeling, or action that’s relevant to our message?

Links

• Connect with Tamsen on LinkedIn
• Find Your Red Thread – Tamsen’s book
• How to Bridge a Mental Gap, Tamsen’s talk from TEDx Wilmington Women

On average, being disabled costs over £500 a month more than not. Couple that with wrinkles in Britain’s benefit scheme that means disabled people don’t have true marriage equality, and you begin to realise how much work there still is to do to build a fairer society.

Rachael Mole’s mission is to help disabled people enter and remain in the workforce. Through her organisation, SIC, Rachael and her team are bridging the gap of ignorance, and helping people living with impairments and chronic illnesses to thrive.

As well as costing more, being disabled can impact your dignity. Mark shares a story of his application under the Conservative government’s Personal. Independent Payment (PIP) scheme, which is the last millimetre at the tip of the iceberg for what many disabled people face. That’s aside from being told we’re cheating the system.

Some of the questions Rachael had to ask herself as a young woman entering the workforce:

• Can I talk to employers about my disability?
• Can I ask for reasonable adjustments?
• How much help can I ask for until I become a burden?
• Once I'm a burden, are they going to want me?

Things to consider

• Diversity of thought is essential to teams. That means it’s essential to hire people from different backgrounds.
• Gen Zers are seeking to put their money behind organisations with ethics, sustainability, and inclusion in mind.
• The term “purple washing” that Mark brings up relates specifically to the performative co-opting of feminist messaging.
• disabled people don’t exist to provide inspiration.

Links

• Connect with Rachael on LinkedIn
• Follow @rachaelmole on Twitter
• Follow @thesicceo on Instagram
• The Purple Pound
• Disability Pride Month

“It’s really easy to make a podcast”, they say. “Everyone deserves to tell their story”. But what if your story is too hard to tell, no matter how important it feels to set it free? HR expert and now podcaster Serena Savini faced these questions and stared down her demons in order to tell her story.

Serena was born with a congenital heart disease that kept her from doing the things most kids love: running, playing, even attending some birthday parties. When this combined with an accident at work, a spark was lit that would allow her not only to learn more about her heart, but open it up to listeners around the world. In her podcast, she holds space for people who are returning to work after an illness or injury, or who have a transformational story to tell.

Some things to consider

• We have an inner intelligence that we need to listen to more.
• Ask for help, even when it feels like you don’t know what you need help with. It’s OK to tell someone you’re struggling, even in what feels like a professional situation.
• You can create something for yourself, even in public, and that’s OK.
• You can tell your own story, however personal, as long as you have the safety to do so.
• Telling your story and handing others the mic is a generous act.
• Push yourself out of your comfort zone, but from a position of safety. That contradiction is easier to resolve with help.

Links

• Connect with Serena on LinkedIn
• I’m Back!, Serena’s podcast
• Song of Myself, 51, by Walt Whitman
• Vision 20/20