First day at #fsbconf 2016

So today was the first day of #fsbconf and it was quite quiet, however, to be fair I believe it is considered to be a warm up day; many people travel up to conference on the first day – they are not all as eager as me and our branch Chairman.

The journey to the SECC made us realise that any bearings we thought we had gathered the night before were completely wrong, so I was quite pleased to be making it by taxi. On arrival at the conference centre we admired the magnificent buildings, noticing BBC Scotland and STV were across the river.

We made our way in and were greeted and directed towards the registration desk, where we were given our name badges and delegate bag – amongst the Conference Programme, marketing literature and other fsb bumpf there was also “The Business of Being Social; A practical guide to harnessing the power of Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube for businesses” jointly written by David Taylor, the fsb’s newly appointed Corporate Communications Co-ordinator. I look forward to reading that!

As we progressed into the hall we passed the exhibitor stands, which seemed to be mostly made up of fsb partners, although not exclusively, which I am sure I will investigate more tomorrow. There was a stand selling items made from tartan and another which made beautiful bags, both of which I am sure were handmade. I also met a lovely lady from PBMC – Positive Brand Marketing and Consulting Ltd – who provides business coaching services and also stopped to speak briefly to the Scotland Stronger IN Europe guys, however I did spend most of the day listening to the seminars. More information about the content of these will follow (I think I set my challenge a little high to be able to blog about it ALL immediately).

Towards the end of the day my Chairman and I attended the new attendees reception which introduced us to conference and explained what we should expect, following which we decided to make our way back to our hotel to freshen up for the evening’s entertainment.

Later on we made our way to Science Museum for dinner, drinks and a thoroughly enjoyable performance by Playing Politics (highly recommended! very funny and great voices too), where we networked with other fsb members from other regions.

I am really excited for tomorrow … if not already a little tired from Kirklees Conference and the drive up yesterday … if only I’d not decided to do these blogs I might have been asleep over an hour ago!

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more reflections from the fsb conference ….