I was fortunate to win a ticket to the Sales & Marketing Super Conference 2012 run by the Entrepreneurs Alliance Inner Circle which is headed by Paul McCarthy and Brad Tonini. If you haven’t heard of either of these two men then you really need to google them and see them speak, really good people. It was a two and a half day conference stacked full of excellent and inspirational speakers. There was plenty of networking time scheduled in between each session as well as before and after. I went with the idea in my head of getting as much as I possibly could out of the time. I had been scheduled for a meeting last Saturday but unfortunately this took precedence.

I have a heap of notes, they had A4 notebooks sitting around and I filled almost four of them, admittedly they don’t have a lot of pages and I was scribbling in large writing as it was easier to write with my distance glasses rather than change them frequently but it’s still a lot of notes. I’ll share just a little of my time with you and if you have an entrepreneurial bent then you should put aside some money to go next year.

Lisa McInnes Smith was a very animated speaker and got us involved by throwing chocolates at everyone who opened their mouths, a good way to start a conference. She was speaking on How To Be a Person of Influence and some of the phrases I’ve made note of are very important in shaping one’s personality. Most of it seems to be about the mindset and what is in your mind shapes what you say and do.

Sam Bakker spoke about webinars and how you can use them in your business to make money. I had an awesome idea, all I need is someone to work with as I don’t have enough information to put into them. If you’re an English teacher currently teaching years 11 or 12 and want more information leave a comment and I’ll get back to you. I do have someone in mind but it’s good to have a team.

Paul McCarthy and Brad Tonini work really well together and know what it takes to succeed in business, they’ve been through it all, have seen the rough and the smooth, the failures and the successes. Here’s a couple of things I wrote down:

• If you think small, you act small, you’ll be small.
• It’s not about where you start but where you want to finish.
• You can have excuses or you can have results.

We had an interesting presentation by James Tuckerman, the founder of Anthill, a successful magazine he virtually ran by himself, it rivalled BRW. He managed to continue running his magazine despite being bedridden for weeks.

Civilian astronaut, Nik Halik gave us lots of information about a system he uses to make money. I didn’t entirely agree with it and tried to maintain an open mind. I did find some in his presentation to keep but made no attempt to consider buying from him.

I’ll skip a lot of my notes and just give you some highlights from memory. Max Walker, a sportsman turned writer and presenter, teamed up with Rob Gell, a former TV presenter and environmentalist to talk about business and QR codes. I wasn’t impressed with Walker but how much of that was due to me not being interested in sport and that being a large part of his speech is beyond me. I was impressed with Rob Gell and he gave out some very useful information about QR codes, I had so many ideas on how to use them but none of them for me.

One of the funniest and most inspirational sessions was presented by Sam Cawthorn. He is an amputee having lost his right arm above the elbow and having more metal in his right leg than bone all due to an accident he was in six years ago. Truly wonderful to be there and see him. He was told he’d never walk again, funny how he managed to run up the aisle. So many jokes about amputees and he made most of them. I’m sure the airport was embarrassed about losing his arm while Kevin Rudd says he is still in therapy after shaking the wrong hand and having it come off in his hand.

The last session tried to pull everything together and asked us some key questions about our time at the conference and what we’re going to do afterwards. The problem with conferences is that you do a lot of learning and networking, this is all well and good but the main work comes later and this is where a lot of people fall down. If you don’t do the work your business will never succeed so this last session concentrated on the first step of implementation. I made masses of notes about things I should be doing throughout the conference but during this last session I put together a plan of action and now I have the hard part of making it happen. I’m going to buy a corkboard and mount it on the cupboard door next to me, on that I will pin my default diary I will be working out this week, thanks to one lady I sat next to I will be colour coding it with all the different tasks. I intend to only have the overall headings on this diary and then have a breakdown of each heading on a different list. After that I’ll start working on the particular headings and follow that with specifics. Hopefully I’ll have a complete plan of action by the end of the week. I’ll be interspersing all of this with housework and sending cards and emails to people at the conference thanking them and following up conversations.

Two things discussed in the last session I found very interesting and useful. The first was about personal development and buying into systems for your business. McCarthy was talking about the systems and said you must be ready to implement them or any money spent on the system will be a waste. The other was about the programme he sells called Mastermind. It’s an intense programme, he takes an initial deposit of $997 (actually just the credit card numbers) with another three payments of the same amount over a year and gives you a detailed questionnaire of 40 questions you need to answer before he spends some time talking to you on the phone. Apparently Mastermind is a finely tuned group of people and he won’t let just anybody into it, if he deems you not suitable then the money isn’t taken from your credit card. I wanted to apply, I’m fairly sure I wouldn’t get in but figured I could learn heaps just from being knocked back, decided not to waste his time.

It’s good to have that written down so I can’t forget my plans. I have the memory of a goldfish at times.

As a reward for reading all of this here’s a photo of a kookaburra I took with my iPad on Friday after the conference. You might be able to read the writing behind the car, we were in Spring Street at the top of Treasury Place.