Brighton Summit blog: What did Look Up mean for you?

The theme for this year’s Brighton Summit was ‘Look Up’. In this blog, photographer and blogger Lauren Psyk explores what ‘Look Up’ meant to her and people she spoke to throughout the day.

Wow - at Brighton Summit the theme of ‘Look Up’ managed to represent and encapsulate so many different things in one day! With such a variety of interactive sessions, speakers and workshops on offer, a huge range of different voices and outlooks were presented. Each member of the audience brought their own goals and objectives to the event and everyone took away something slightly different.

I spoke to as many people as possible during the day about what ‘Look Up’ meant to them and what their key takeaways were. Here are just a few of the many meanings for ‘Look Up’ I discovered during Brighton Summit.

Look outwards 

During the Event Horizon hour, ‘looking up’ meant sharing knowledge and helping others. ‘The big knowledge share’ encouraged us to look outwards to what we could offer other businesses, before trying to satisfy our own goals.

Everyone in the room completed an ‘ambition sheet’ with the top goal for their business. However, rather than spending the session looking inwards, instead, we spent the session reaching out to others and offering them help to complete their goals.

This was important for two reasons. Firstly, it meant that each of us came away with some fantastic offers of help. Secondly, it encouraged us all to remember the wealth of ideas, knowledge, contacts and skills that we have to offer others. I found this a great confidence booster and a useful reminder that networking is very much a two way process.

Work smarter

For Andrea Collings of marketing agency Terrier Marketing, ‘Look Up’ meant learning to work smarter. Her business goal was to find new leads and new clients, but the morning keynote from Claire Mason had influenced her thinking. She said, “my key takeaway from today has been that we need to stop chasing down every client and every small lead just because we feel we need to have work coming in each month. Ultimately it’s stopping us from achieving our goal - instead, we need to go for the right clients; the ones we really want to work with.”

Embrace openness

I was struck by the openness of the people I met from different sectors to me and I was reminded just what a diverse audience Brighton Chamber attracts. I spent time chatting to people in catering, publishing, law, marketing, accounting, events, photography and education. I met people with completely different objectives and business outlooks to me, but despite this we still found some common ground, shared ideas and listened to each other. For example, Chris Barnard from accountancy firm UHY Hacker Young told me he was keen to find new innovations for his company and better ways to get his ideas across to colleagues. He said, “the problem solving workshop was about breaking down fences. You need to be able to listen and take other people’s views on board and this enables you to help your company to work in new ways.”

Go big or go home

Undeniably, a major theme of the day was the discovery of big and bold new possibilities. Throughout the event, we were encouraged to step out of our comfort zones and to be bold in our ambitions. During the afternoon speaker session ‘Look at me now’ I heard from Helen, who was bold and brave enough to share her inspiring story of overcoming addiction. She now works as a manager at Brighton Housing Trust and told us that she often feels like pinching herself as her life has changed beyond all recognition. Helen’s strength and determination to achieve things she never thought possible perfectly encapsulated the idea of ‘Look Up’ for me.

Others I spoke to had taken similar inspiration from Claire Mason’s opening keynote. Deborah Taylor from Book-Launch Your Business said, “what Claire said has encouraged me to be bolder and take more risks. It has spurred me on to approach bigger publishers with my ideas. I want to meet brave people who want to step out of their comfort zones and who want to ‘go big’ and seize the opportunity.”

The idea of scaling up had resonated with Tariq Sayfoo from event sponsor EMW Law. Tariq told me, “the key takeout for me was the idea of scaling up, finding your field and being the leader in it. That’s exactly what we help others to do; we are all about getting to that next level of scaling. Our expertise can support businesses who are looking to scale up and seek investment.”

Thanks to Lauren for writing this blog. 

 

If you want to contribute to the Chamber blog, contact us on hannah@brightonchamber.co.uk