Mayo Open Coffee Report March 2010

On Wednesday I had the pleasure of attending the Mayo Open Coffee Club in my alma mater, GMIT, in Castlebar. It was an interesting experience and deserving of a write up in my all too infrequent blog :)

Pearce Flannery

I arrived a couple of minutes late, so I dont know how the event kicked off, but when I arrived Pearce Flannery was in full flow. If you don’t know Pearce, he’s an entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker extraordinaire, and I can attest to that last.

Pearce spoke incredibly well, delivering a rousing and informative motivational talk perfect for the audience of business owners present. I took extensive notes during the talk and I’ll write up a further post on this blog with that asap (subscribe to the RSS feed or put your email address in the box in the sidebar to receive a notification when that happens). I highly recommend him as a speaker for any business events you have.

Making Use of Good Advice

After Pearce finished, there was a short Q&A, particularly focusing on how to put Pearce’s advice into practice – rather than forgetting the whole thing and going back to the same old ways of doing things. I found this discussion particularly interesting as I realised that the Mayo OCC group were looking to become something similar to a small network I am involved in – the Kaizen Group (you’ll see the logo in the sidebar of this site).

Kaizen is Japanese for “continuing improvement”, of Toyota management fame. The Kaizen Group is a small group of 8 business owners who formed up to help each others’ businesses. The idea was to have a small, completely trustworthy group of peers who will give honest feedback and criticism. (We met through the DCEB LINK Network, which is now under threat of closure.)

From the discussion at Mayo OCC, it appeared to me that something like Kaizen is what they are looking for.

Not Your Typical Open Coffee

I shall not make a joke about the distinct lack of coffee ;) but the main differentiator between this Mayo Open Coffee meetup and the other OCC’s I have attended in the past (in Mayo, Dublin and elsewhere) was the formality of proceedings.

The event kicked off with a speaker, and moved onto a short open discussion and Q&A. After that, there was a breakdown into groups of 5-6 people, where we each had to do a quick intro and declare business goals (as suggested as part of the discussion after the talk). This part was quite formally organised.

I skipped out after 20 minutes of this exercise, (to meet an ex-lecturer and friend for coffee!) and to head for a train.

My thoughts

I highly commend the Mayo OCC organisers for having Pearce come in and give a super talk, and for the work in organising the group afterwards. However, and here’s the “but”, Open Coffees are just that, “open”. I found the proceedings quite formal and prescribed in comparison to others.

It appears to me that the Mayo OCC group is migrating towards a more directed business network approach, more like the county enterprise boards sponsored events (like the LINK network mentioned above).

This approach has advantages and disadvantages – it will be interesting to see in what direction the Mayo OCC has evolved when I next attend.

I’ll be doing a blog post soon on Pearce’s talk. Your comments and suggestions on this post are welcomed – please leave a comment below.

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