Microsoft Accelerator – Week Eight

IMG_7081There was only one organised session this week and that was on “old school PR”. Unfortunately I had to attend a sales meeting and so wasn’t able to attend. However, what this did mean was that my diary was much clearer for getting on with the day job.

The stage your business is at when you join an accelerator will determine both how much you get out of it and how much of an impact it will have on your working day. When we joined we had already been in business a year and were making early sales. For us it was important to keep the momentum we had built as well as making the most from the programme. This inevitably means that there are some compromises to make in terms of attending sessions and meetings with prospects and clients.

We are lucky in that Microsoft understands that we need to keep the business moving forward and are flexible enough to ensure that we can get to as many sessions as possible. Also when there are one-to-ones with experts we can swap times with other companies to ensure that we can make the session. In some ways these one-to-ones are more useful than the general sessions because they can be tightly tailored to your business meaning that you can get solutions to real problems. I found that with the UX session held in week six.

Another unexpected and tangential benefit of the accelerator has turned out to be an introduction from one of the other participating companies to a graphic designer. We have used a number of different people in the past to get graphics done both for the site and the webapps themselves but had never found anyone who’s style we liked and understood what we were trying to achieve quickly and easily. This we have now done and the quality of the graphics has not only been lifted but also has provided us with some really great visuals to explain what we do – a real bonus.

Another result that shouldn’t have been surprising is that because as a business are spending so much time together, rather than home working, we are getting more done as it is so much easier to bounce ideas off one another. So much for remote collaborative working!

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