 Hi everyone, well I am here at MTU in Cork as Trudy Murray earlier on invited eight entrepreneurs as well as myself to come in to share stories of our entrepreneurial journey and lessons along the way and the first thing I did was I ran an Instagram story here with the students asking them what was their greatest business or career fear and without a doubt the number one answer was failure and my answer to that was what is failure is it not trying is it not succeeding is it a metric that you have in your head is it something that happened years ago that you consider failure to be synonymous with and then I said really what you need to think about is okay how do we prevent it what's the worst that can happen etc and really think through that but what I actually said then was failure doesn't always mean change but success does because success then may lead to greater accountability greater responsibility greater ability etc so I said when it comes to considering failure you need to ask yourself what's the worst that can happen and how can I handle it but also you need to ask yourself what's the best that could happen and how could I handle it and then what I went on to do then was pick up on what all of the other speakers spoke about and then I added in my own bit of value on top of that so Ollie and Harry for example and everyone's tagged in this post Ollie and Harry spoke about the importance of knowing your target market so what I added to that was it's really also important to distinguish within your target market who is the decision maker who is the buyer who is the influencer and who is the user because Trudy and I with another teacher called Brian the three of us rolled positive economics 10 years ago and it went on to become the market leading economics textbook leaving search then we went on and we wrote it again the second time and along the way we had to keep four different characters in mind we had to think about who was the user the student who was the decision maker the teacher who was the budget provider the parent who was the influencer it was the reps from the publisher edco so we had to be considerate of the fact that we didn't just have one target market and well we did but we had to think about the different characters that were in there and then Sam spoke about outsourcing he said you can't do it all yourself and he is totally right so what I added there is that if you want to try something out before you get started or try something out and collect a lot of market research or try something out on a low code tool I suggest air table and air table was recommended to me from the fabulous beyond team who I worked with last October and since then we've been using it really really really well and really efficiently and I find it fantastic so it can be a super useful tool to have along the way Daniel then made the point that there's information around every corner and I totally agree and that's why I also encourage people to say like collect your market research as you go from a business point of view talk to your customers maybe it is like I did here running an Instagram story maybe it's a LinkedIn poll maybe it's having a conversation with your customers but from a personal point of view of course it is recruitment companies publishing salary data maybe it is mock interviews and getting feedback from them maybe it is asking for interview questions that are being asked today in competency based interviews to use that to inform your market research then Derek went on to talk about the importance of external or he he spoke about the importance of doing that research with owners and just something I wanted to add on to that is something that Deirdre Lines taught me that Jeff Bezos taught her which is externalization and that is that it's really important to solve your own problem so if you have a problem and you're able to solve it for yourself well and then you can externalize that so you can sell it to others well then the likelihood is there's other people on going through your problem and of course you can empathize with them so if you can externalize the solution to your own problem that can be a really good way to either create a solution to a business problem and thus possibly a new product but also as well to empathize from a career point of view with the people who are also experiencing that and then Cloda went on to speak about the value of networking now most of you who I know here I have met through that and I spoke about my 2015 New Year's resolution which is deepen your network is rather than trying to constantly broaden your network what about deepening your network simply staying in contact with the people that you know already and I also encourage the people here because they were based in cork as they consider a network cork stems out west go to the people who I met yesterday might have been interested in accounting go to the various different accounting bodies organizations networking events if you're interested in cfa Ireland or cfa globally their networking events sign up for newsletters connecting with people on linkedin who you admire there's so many ways to build your network digitally and in person and then lucy she spoke about your value system which is make sure that whatever you're doing that you find your passion now first of all again look I agree with them all right but something that I just mentioned to them as well is that think through what would I do if I literally wasn't paid for it but I'd love to do it anyway that's a real clue into what your passion might be but then the second thing to do is to add a commercial layer onto that is think think of ways you could make money out of that so the task that I set them was write down 30 ways you could make money out of your passion 30 ways they don't have to be realistic but just by doing that it turns on the idea your it flicks the switch in your brain so that then you can think about how can my brain go looking for ways to make money out of this and it's something that I did in savvy guide to make you more money I was tasked I tasked myself with this and I did it in in a traditional idea idea and then somebody said to me imagine if like I was really passionate about porcelain dolls how could I come up with ways to make money out of that so I came up with 30 ways of doing it they didn't have to be feasible or realistic and I didn't have to pursue any of them but by actually going through that practice of 30 ways you could make money out of this that is the way in which you can marry your passion and a commercial sort of an acumen and also then authenticity people a lot of them spoke about authenticity people buy from people and you are your brand and that's why I encouraged everybody here to make sure to get on LinkedIn before they even left the building to make sure and to connect in there but Johnny also spoke about you know know what you want to get out of business and it was very thought provoking actually what he spoke about he said that it's important to think through how far are you willing to go how far do you want to take this business you know for better or for worse how big do you want to grow or or if the chips are down how how much do you want to back it and then he said make sure and ask your partners that as well to make sure that your value systems are aligned and what I did was I added to that is when it comes to knowing what you want out of it out of a business or out of a career I told the story of you know the the jar in the rocks that a teacher came into school one day and had a jar and there was rocks big rocks in it and he asked the students is this full and they said yeah and then he put in the pebbles around it and then then he put the lid on and he said is this full and they said yeah and then he said then he put in sand and of course the sand went in around the pebbles and he said now is it full and they said yeah and he's definitely now and then he said then he put in water and the point here was that what are your rocks like what are the rocks in the jar what really matters to you when it comes to work life balance success sacrifice you know achievement what is it that you're willing to do and what are you not and then let the pebbles and the water and the sand which is the smaller stuff respectively in life fill filling around that adding on to that as well then we spoke today about competition and how important it is to understand who your competition is but also it's very healthy to have competition it sets a framework but also you can have primary and secondary competition primary competition are people who directly compete with you secondary competition is where you're dealing with the up like people's opposite use of something so for example in the case of a coffee shop I may not go to a coffee shop might go to a restaurant I might drink tea instead of coffee I might make the coffee at home I might not drink coffee at all is that as distinct to well the other coffee shops are and it's just important to distinguish between primary and secondary competition and we also spoke about like no business plan can prepare you for certain things we talked about covid and we talked about a range of other things and that is why I think that it's also important to think about you know how you look at a problem and I interviewed the Attorney General in the north in Northern Ireland at IOD Northern Ireland two years ago now and one of the things she really taught me and I've told a lot of you this over the years is that she really taught me to always be very very clear on what the problem really is so here's another quick story for you and landlord one day went into his multi-story building and the tenants were complaining about how slow the lift was so then he said okay he started looking into all sorts of engineering feats that were going to be wildly expensive and then somebody said put up a mirror beside the button where people are waiting for a lift so he did and then a couple of days later his tenants were complimenting him on speeding up the lift the problem was not the speed of the lift the problem was the length of the weight and when there was a mirror there of course then people could look at themselves and that was endlessly entertaining so therefore they didn't notice it until the lift was there be very very clear in understanding a problem before you try and solve it or as she said to me be very very clear in understanding the problem before jumping into the giant hairball of the solution we had loads and loads and loads more insights and again I just wanted to thank Trudy Murray for inviting me here to speak to everybody and also to the other entrepreneurs for meeting with you it was a joy to meet you all and I wish you all the best and I hope this has been useful for other people thanks everyone bye