17. 5 Lessons Learned while traveling in the UK

For the next few episodes, we are breaking away from the normal pattern of our topics to really dive into some of the historic, life-changing, and life-inspiring events and lessons that occurred over the last two weeks or so. I was traveling between London, England, Paris, France, and Portsmouth, England, and a lot took place.

London - Portsmouth:

My trip started with 

• an amazing meeting with the awesome team at LiveFlow in London and 

• continued in Paris, France, where I was attending a Law Firm workshop on helping law firm owners wrap their minds around the finance side of their business of just talking about 

• Concluded with some downtime with family and witnessing the historic funeral of Queen Elizabeth II while I was in the UK

So what we are going to do is introduce an event or activity that happened and then discuss the business lessons learned, because the stuff your bookkeeper isn’t telling you is how real-life events impact your business:

Key Topics

• UK 10 days of mourning - so on the day that I was flying out, literally as I am in the airport headed to my gate to fly to London, an announcement was made - Queen Elizabeth dies at age 93. 

  • The country went into mourning and initiated plans for consoling the nation, the transition of power, activating preparations for a state funeral, memorial service

  • Business lesson: 

    • (1) plan ahead, the royal family/royal counsel had succession plans in place for years

    • (2) don’t forget to comfort your people during a traumatic transition

    • (3) balance compassion and respect for the complex reality of life and business (the British empire was not admired the same way by all)

• Raising Capital in a coffee shop - during my visit with the LiveFlow team one of the founders and I went on a coffee run as I was still pretty jet lagged but while there we happened to me an American investor from the Silicon Valley area who was living in London. We got into a conversation about why I was there and discussing LiveFlow. Long story short the investor runs an investment fund in London and I believe LiveFlow caught his attention for a very important reason.

  • Proof of happy consumers - I am a very happy and satisfied customer of LiveFlow’s product not because I am an investor or paid to say so I actually like and heavily use the product so on the spot I was able to communicate this to the fund manager.

  • Business Lesson - find a way to incorporate honest, transparent conversations with your customers into your pitch deck, investor presentation and even your sales pitches. When people know that you have happy paying customers that are seeing profitable benefits from your product or service, it makes your job even easier to (1) raise capital, (2) close a deal, etc.

• The funeral was a national event

  • Business lesson: the Royal Navy seamen that carried the casket stood out to me the most - they knew that they were carrying something important and all eyes were on them so they had to be focused, mourn and stay coordinated - 

    • For business owners when you pick an accountant Are they the only one handling your most valuable asset or do they have a team, if they have a team do they have processes. I've seen alot of business owners struggle because the person they are paying had an issue come up and there were no backup plans

• Detours require more communication - the day of the funeral meant train lines and bus routes would be down so the workers had to over communicate to avoid confusion. 

  • When something happens that require a detour you have to over communicate with your clients