I've been going to the Entrepreneurs Circle Convention for years and I've always bought the Standard ticket. It's the cheapest one, you get to sit in the same room and listen to the same speakers, but you don't get all the extras that come with Gold or VIP.
One of those extras is a bloody enormous workbook.
For two days I sit there watching people around me scribbling away in these things, filling page after page with notes and Golden Nuggets, presumably with every intention of going back to the office and implementing the lot. And maybe they do. Although I have a sneaking suspicion quite a few of those workbooks eventually find their way onto a shelf and stay there until next year's Convention.
I don't take many notes
It's not because I don't think the speakers have anything worth saying. Far from it. It's because after more than 40 years of running my own business, I know that most of what I hear simply won't be relevant to the way I run WDA. I could write down 100 ideas and come home with a huge to-do list, but I know myself well enough by now to realise I'm not going to do 97 of them.
My approach is much simpler.
If I remember it when I get home, it's gold.
And after two days at the 2026 National Entrepreneurs Convention, there are definitely a few things that made it back to Chichester with me.
Geoff Ramm was one of them. His whole session was about making customers feel like celebrities and the difference between doing something at 80% and doing it properly at 100%. One example was something as simple as sending a quotation. You can just ping off an email with a price attached, or you can think about the person receiving it and make the whole thing feel a bit more special.
I loved his session, came home on Wednesday, opened my email and there was an enquiry asking us to quote for supplying print to University Hospitals Sussex NHS Foundation Trust.
Geoff's session immediately popped into my head.
I'd been back at work for about five minutes and something I'd heard at the Convention was already affecting how I approached a real job. I even commented on Geoff's LinkedIn post afterwards to tell him what he'd done to me.
That's gold.
Helena Langdon was completely different. She spent years working at Innocent and was absolutely hilarious. Some of the examples she showed had the whole audience in hysterics, but underneath the laughs was some seriously clever marketing.
I couldn't give you one particular Golden Nugget from her session. What I came away with was more of a reassurance that the way I've always liked to market WDA isn't completely bonkers.
You can have a sense of humour. You can have a personality. You can take the piss occasionally. You don't have to turn into some terribly earnest corporate marketing machine just because you're talking about business.
In fact, the line that has stayed with me since we started talking about her session afterwards is:
Marketing doesn't have to take itself too seriously to be taken seriously.
Then we had Cameron Botterill, the Golden Nugget Man himself, who rather inconveniently for my no-note-taking theory proceeded to give us 14 of the bloody things. I''ve photographed them imstead does that count as cheating?
There were some really practical ideas in there. Put your phone number on landing pages. Send personalised videos. Make sure the headline on the advert follows through to the landing page. Re-send emails to non-openers. Think about lifecycle ads.
And one ridiculously simple one that caught my attention was making better use of the P.S. at the bottom of emails, particularly as somewhere to put another useful link. We've been sending WDA emails for years. We're going to start looking at that. I don't need a six-month marketing strategy to implement it. It's a P.S.
And then there was John Volanthen. John was one of the British cave divers involved in rescuing the young football team trapped in the caves in Thailand in 2018. He received a standing ovation when he walked onto the stage, before he'd even said anything, and another one when he finished. For the time in between, I think most of the 2,000 people in that room were holding their breath. Of course we knew how the story ended. We knew the children got out. But listening to someone who was actually there describe what happened, the decisions they had to make and the determination to keep going when the whole thing seemed impossible was extraordinary.
There wasn't a business lesson attached to it. Nobody put a slide up afterwards telling us the five marketing principles of cave diving. It was simply an incredible story about perseverance, doggedness, problem solving and refusing to give up.
And I know I'll remember it.
There were plenty of other speakers over the two days and I enjoyed listening to them. Some made me laugh, some made me think and some talked about things that simply aren't relevant to a two-man design business in Chichester.
That's okay. I don't go to the Convention expecting to come home and completely reinvent my business every year. I go because amongst all the ideas, stories, conversations, silliness, cowboy hats and this year an entire Wild West town built across the stage, something normally gets through.
In 2024 one word got through to me.
PERSISTENCE
I've bored everyone senseless with that one ever since, but it genuinely changed the way I approached marketing my own business.
This year I've come home thinking about making that next customer feel a little more special. I've been reminded that humour absolutely has a place in good marketing. I've got a handful of practical ideas from Cameron that we'll actually try. And I've heard one extraordinary man's story that I suspect I'll remember for the rest of my life.
That's plenty. The people with the Gold and VIP badges can keep their enormous workbooks. I'll stick with my Standard ticket.
If I remember it when I get home, it's gold.
