The value of personal! Review of first EBN Social event!

Before business, comes personal.

Personal relationship is the foundation of business relationships.

Review of our first EBN social event

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This week we had a beautiful presentation from Amy from Pretty Steeling. We also had a fresh element of the year. That was very exciting and here and welcome to the independent local dreamers, doers, and business builders, and keeping the future wrong. Each week we'll take real stories, flex ideas, and powerful conversations to help you grow your business, your mindset, and your network. Because here in Gibraltar, we don't compete, we collaborate. Let's build something great together. A huge part and value of the EBN membership is that we have featured presentations. Featured presentation means a member every week gets to present about their business for 10 minutes and explain not just the business side but the personal side is very important. That's how we get to learn, understand one another, and build deeper relationships. It's not a case of it's a sales pitch that you're just coming out to tell people about your business, and here's the sales pitch, and here's a checkout link, and and buy bye bye. It's more about an expression of understanding who that person is, their family, uh, their how they got into the business actually. That's one thing you will not learn if you walk into a retail shop and the owner's behind the counter. It's not gonna give you the time of day to start telling you about how you got into this business or any of those things. And it's really important with EBN community, we are looking to build long-lasting relationships, not passive transactions. That's not what this is about. If you're coming into this community and thinking you're just coming for a transactional relationship, that is not the right attitude. We're here to build relationships, and that's exactly what these 10-minute presentations allow us to do. This week it was Amy Pretty from Pretty Sailing. This is a really a great example of looking at a business from the outside and thinking, Wow, she sails around Gibraltar to different countries, and it's it looks amazing, and it's like on sailing boats, you've got that kind of yacht style, uh lifestyle, and you're thinking this is for the multi-millionaires, this is unachievable for most of us. So it's great to see a business like that, and then when you start to learn about the owner and the concept, which is to make sailing approachable for the average person, which I think a lot of us, when you think about sailing and yachts and all the other fancy stuff that goes along with that, you think this is not for this is not for us. I mean, I would love to get into it, but it's not for us. And the benefit of having these 10-minute feature presentation is to bring it back down to earth, uh, an industry which would once have been very distant for you to get access to, and now it becomes very easy. You have a contact, you have a person who you are meeting every week, and to hear her background as well. Starting out, she was working in a pub 10 years ago in in England, and seeing I think it was her father that was sending videos, he's a skipper, uh, meaning a boat captain, someone who's who's qualified to manage a ship, a boat. I'd seen his videos from around the world, and she's sitting there in a pub. And I think we've all had that like being sit sat in a job that you you don't like, let's say in an office in a cubicle. For me, setting that's what it was like sitting in a cubicle doing a corporate job, admin that I just did not like, thinking, is this it? Is this the pinnacle of my life? And what makes it worse is looking at your boss who's 20, 30 years ahead of you, 40, and thinking, that's my future. Like, do I want their lifestyle? Yes, they might be on more money, but they're generally they've got this huge the overweight look and stress relationships, not in the right place, and you're thinking, That's my future, is that what I want? And then you start thinking, there's got to be more to life. Uh, that's my background as well, and Amy's as well, um, from Pretty Sailing. Look in a job in a job in in a pub in England, thinking, Am I just gonna be pulling pints for the rest of my life? And then getting videos from our father from all over the world in this glamorous setting of sailing and ships and beautiful blue waters, and thinking, nah, I need to make a move. So she does make a move to here in Gibraltar, gets her license, which is her skipper license and qualification, and then starts pretty sailing. So it was great to hear that background and how they're making it more accessible for people. And just from that, after that presentation, a lot of our members were like, Yeah, we want to we wanna come on board and and come to your taster event and and become qualified and take it from there. And that is the benefit of these 10-minute presentations to allow members access into your world, which then we understand their business better, which then allows us to gain and uh speak passionately about their business for referrals because there'll be members of our family that are thinking about this that also want those services, but we just don't know enough about people's businesses to be able to recommend them. That's the benefit, that's what we do these 10-minute presentations for. Also, people have been in business for 10 years, 15 years, and never had the opportunity to speak in front of a group of people about their business. It's a great opportunity from a self-development perspective to be able to stand up and concisely and clearly talk about your business. And of course, passionately, don't be robotic. Amy's presentation was uh f just so uh passionately. We had some IT issues at the beginning, we're trying to s um swap laptops, note to self, make sure all the presentation is on one laptop, not over two laptops, because when we plugged in her laptop with the HDMI cable, I just didn't want to connect. Bit of an IT issue, but hey, we figured that out, so that's a note to itself. Make sure all presentations are in one laptop, not two. And it was so she had a great demo video as well, two minutes at the end, and wow, it looked like a a movie scene, you know. The the high beat tone and the music and the the imagery, it was amazing. They've got a YouTube channel, uh Pretty Sailing on YouTube. It just looks a million dollars, it's amazing. That was their presentation, that was our meeting last week. Also, the same evening we had the same day we had an evening out. So that was seeing our members in the morning at 7am, and also seeing our members at 7 pm. This was our first social event of the year, and also the first one of of all. So it was the very first one of EBN, and it was fantastic. It was organized by our our events coordinator who is Boa. She's done a great job uh setting up the location. Somewhere I've never been in Gibraltar, a rooftop terrace in a place called My Wines. If you know Gibraltar, you'll know where that is. Rooftop Terrace, fantastic. Honestly, it was great. It was it was great to see previous members that had come joined for a short period of time, then they left for family commitment, and then had come to these nights out, even though they're not coming to the meetings anymore, they stay they still came to the night out, they still engage with the community. And note to self, name tags are very important, not just in the meetings, but also at social events. Because whilst I I know the old members and the current members, the people in the room don't know each other, and it's important that they are connected. And this was very apparent where I had a group of people messaging me saying, Hey, we're at the venue, we're here, and another person messaged me saying, Hey, I'm at the venue, but nobody's here. When I get there, these people are sat across the room from one another. I'm like, hey, this is the this is the event, it's here, but because the two groups of people don't know each other, and that's that was the thing, they don't know each other, and the thing gluing the connection was myself. Uh, but what we would love to have is be clear that everyone is in one community, so you can't have people from across the room not knowing each other, both waiting for the same person to show up. Name tags would definitely be apparent and and helpful. I've posted social media content about this this week, so you go back, it's the event was at the end of March, so just go back and have a look. I think it was March the 28th, Thursday the 28th, 26th, sorry, of March. Go back and look at our Facebook page, you'll see images and videos of that. I gave a I I guess off the cuff one-minute speech just to welcome everybody, and it was such an honor. Uh, this eBN community is growing faster than we can keep up with the memberships. We'll grow it's grown so quick every single week. Um new members are joining us, and it's it's great to see a community getting built. This is the core of the community right now. So if you are a Gibraltarian or you live in Gibraltar and you're running a business, this is the place to join us. For if you want long-lasting relationships, not just business transactions, join us. We actually this week had half the room were from Spain, a Spanish just some our link must have got out there, Facebook put us out there, and half the room were Spanish. One lady in particular didn't speak a word of English or understand it, but she was still there, which is which is amazing. And she gave her 60-second presentation in Spanish. I think the only thing with Spanish is it's me that doesn't understand Spanish. Everyone else in the room understands Spanish, so to be honest. As always, with anything in life, if you look at a problem, it's generally you're probably the problem, and you need to change. Um, it's no problem her not speaking English, it's my problem that I don't speak Spanish. So, always that's that's how you improve things in life. If you start blaming everybody else, nothing will get done. You always should really look at yourself and self-evaluate where is the real bottleneck here, where's the problem in your business, in your life, in your relationships. You might always think, Oh, my partner's like this, my partner's like that, or you could just take a second and be like, Am I maybe the cause of this? What am I doing? That's that's maybe the problem here. Am I do I need to change? That's the way I like to look at all sorts of problems because at the end of the day, if you change, you will improve yourself and probably resolve the other problem as well, instead of just pointing the finger and be like, I wish that person would speak that language. Well, maybe you should speak the other language that the majority of people speak in the room, so it would be great to do that. And we had people that have networking events in Spain, and they came across so they were able to give us some advice on how to make it a bit more uh multilingual, such as this app which you can put on a screen next to our presentation screen, which does live translation. That would be very cool. That would be that would be amazing. Live translation uh that would be interesting to see that in action, but that opens up the demographic a lot wider, so that's an improvement. But we're enjoying what we do. This week is uh a holiday, it's a Gibraltarian national holiday, and therefore we should be off as well because we're not going to push against the decades or generations of Jibrillian uh history where they all everyone relaxes on these bank holidays. We're not gonna force our EBN meetings against the the flow of their generational habits. That's just not something that is uh why I try to swim up upstream. So we're off this week, and I'm certain by the next time you hear this episode, uh this podcast, we will have a batch of new members as well. We're currently at 20 members. Our goal for 2026, we're in March, just going into April, was 25. Now, to be honest with you, I think we're gonna break through that record very, very soon. Um, yeah, we're at 20, the goal for 2026 is 25. Sometimes in a week we've had four new members, so we'll we'll break it very very soon in the next couple of weeks. So stay tuned to see our progress, and I hope to see you in the meeting as well. Follow us on Facebook using the links underneath this episode and the links from the meeting. Thanks for tuning in to Gibraltar's Entrepreneurs podcast. Remember, success isn't about growing it alone, it's about growing together. If you're ready to connect with Gibraltar's current team and entrepreneurs, join us every Thursday morning and become part of the movement.