Posts Tagged ‘GrowSmartBiz Conference’
Monday, November 1st, 2010
On Friday, November 5, 2010, the Second Annual GrowSmartBiz Conference will take place at the Renaissance Hotel in downtown Washington DC. If last year’s conference gives us any idea about how this year’s one will be, you can expect a full day of great tips from real subject matter experts across a wide range of topics that impact small business and startups. I have to say last year my wife (who owns a small business) and I both attended and we could not stop talking about the energy, the people we met, the important tips we learned and frankly all of the fun we had in one day. Besides our experience going to SXSW in 2009 when I co-presented, this is hands down one of my personal favorite conferences I have attended – and I even worked the conference last year manning the “SmallBiz Answers Booth” with PR specialists, lawyers, marketers, developers and startup founders.
So here are 4 independent reasons to attend this year’s GrowSmartBiz Conference:
1. The Speakers Are Awesome and Experienced Starting with the keynotes that include Successful Entrepreneur Raul Fernandez all the way to the speakers and moderator at the four track sessions and excellent. The speaker list includes small business, technology, social media and PR kings like Ramon Ray (recently on MSNBC), Brent Leary, Marissa Levin, Joe Libava, Steven King, Jill Foster, Shonali Burke, Tinu Abayomi-Paul, Ken Yancey and Rohit Bhargava. And this is just a few of the names that will be there on Friday. The full speaker list can be found here and Jill Foster has a great summary of the lineup on her excellent blog Live Your Talk.
2. The Topics Are Going to be Highly Informative Building off last year’s conference, the organizers this year broke the conference into four main tracks: 1) Marketing & Innovation; 2) Small Business, Government & Non-Profits; 3) Technology as a Tool for Your Business; and 4) Entrepreneur Bootcamp. Each of these four tracks has a dense topic list that includes Socal Media Marketing, Learning How to Tell Your Business Story, How to Track and Keep Customers, 6 Rules for Tech Success and Tips for Smart Hiring Practices. These are just some of the great topics (see full agenda) that will help any small business and startup.
3. Great Networking Opportunities It has been reported in many places (and I have heard first hand) that small businesses would like to spend more time networking and learning from each other. Well GrowSmartBiz took the feedback from last year;’s conference and created more opportunities for the small business attendees to network and meet each other. This year there are multiple times during the day when you can meet the fellow attendees and also ask the speakers questions after their presentations. More networking means more learning and more business opportunities for your business.
4. Pre-Event Happy Hour This year a night before the conference happy hour for speakers, bloggers, the media, attendees and sponsors is being organized. This way you can start networking even before the conference begins! Who knows your question or story may end up being referenced or mentioned on Friday by one of the speakers. My wife’s website got mentioned last year during Ramon Ray’s presentation after he met her right before his speaking session. Here is the information on the Thursday evening Happy Hour!
These are just some of the reasons to sign up and attend on Friday. Last year there were well over 400 attendees live in person and hundreds more that watched it streaming live from as far as Australia.
Hope to see you there! By the way, here is the signup information at the Washington Business Journal site.
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