Xero UK MD Gary Turner says:
I’ve just returned from the Business Networking Show 2016 in Wolverhampton where Xero was the sponsor.
The team at 4Networking have been running this event for three years now and it always attracts a good crowd.
A few people asked me today why an accounting software company decided to sponsor what looks like quite a niche event.
First, it’s not an exaggeration to say that about 40% of the attendees I personally chatted with today were already Xero customers. So, this says that the event attendee demographic from a sponsor’s perspective is probably as close to being Xero’s market sweet spot as you can get.
It’s also just great to meet so many happy customers.
The second reason is sort of connected to the first one. When Xero was first getting going and we were slogging away fighting to get our first few customers on board – back in 2010 signing up maybe five new customers a day was the norm, and the occasional double figure days were a cause for real celebration – we took a cheap exhibitor table at a small business event and as we did back in those boot-strap days I went along to help out.
That’s when I saw the founder of 4Networking, Brad Burton, speak for the first time as he’d been invited by the event organisers as a guest speaker.
Brad was very different to the other speakers – loud, brash, cocky, jeans, t-shirt, tattoos – but he gave what was at times a funny, at times deeply moving talk that touched on the hard realities of life in self-employment, the challenges, the sleepless nights, the worry, the sitting in your box room in your underpants aggressively waiting for the phone to ring – and he also shared a heartfelt and personal story of one of his business friends slowly dying of cancer. In short, the theme of Brad’s talk was life is too short for sitting on your arse, which was no mistake as he’d just published his first book Get Off Your Arse.
I instantly liked Brad, and I’ve grown to like and respect him even more down the years. Once you see past the self proclaimed “UK’s #1 Motivational Speaker” stage persona with the Manc swagger and puffed out chest, you’ll find one of the most genuine, warm and decent people you could hope to know. And he’s also bang on when he says he’s not as daft as he looks.
Anyway, as the event wound down there was a charity raffle and I bought a bunch of raffle tickets and duly won a signed copy of Brad’s book — sometimes things just happen for a reason.
I collected my prize and the event organiser pointed me in Brad’s direction to get him to sign it for me. We chatted briefly and I told him I’d loved his talk, that we were in accounting software to which he politely said something like “Oh, interesting.” and then we parted ways.
Over the weeks that followed I read the book and enjoyed it. It’s as much autobiographical as it is a self-help guide for the often helplessly unguided self-employed. We exchanged a few Tweets and one day I noticed Brad put out a plea for anyone who could help 4Networking with some issues they were having with their accounting software (not naming names, but think of a herb).
I saw it as an opportunity to introduce Xero. Aside from genuinely wanting to help I also thought that to succeed in winning Brad Burton as a customer could turn out to be a great awareness boost for Xero – many tens of thousands of people would have heard of Brad Burton versus perhaps a couple of thousand who’d heard of Xero.
So, I promised Brad and 4Networking as much help and assistance as they needed if they wanted to make the transition across to Xero, at no charge, for however long they needed it and we eventually won them over as one of our earliest customers.
It felt like a great little PR coup.
Looking back I’m pleased to say that I’d calculated correctly, and Brad’s advocacy of Xero to his large social media following as well as the 4Networking membership, back at a time when we had about five staff and barely a few thousand customers definitely contributed to growing critical, early awareness of Xero.
While we celebrate the fact that Xero is now the UK’s most searched for accounting software brand, as I mentioned earlier the sheer number of Xero customers I bumped into at the Business Networking Show this morning is a real measure of Brad’s cheerleading for Xero in those early days.
Therefore, we also support TBNS because it’s also our way of paying back Brad and his team for having faith and belief in us, and for doing their part in helping to build awareness of Xero long before many of our now 130,000+ customers knew we even existed.
So, thank you. We’re proud to be part of the 4N family.
Gary Turner UK MD Xero
And a big thank you too to you Gary for a great keynote presentation at TBNS and the fantastic support that the Xero team gave the show as sponsor. This post is taken from Gary’s LinkedIN Pulse post ‘A thank you note to Brad Burton’ which you can see here: www.linkedin.com/pulse/thank-you-note-gary-turner