LinkedIn

Dear Reader,

Sorry, I have sinned for I have not been updating our company blog as much as my soul told me to do - the same goes for my LinkedIn profile and all the other Social Network things that one should be keeping fresh.

However, I did recently receive this email that I am proud of and will encourage me to do more, please allow me to share it: 

Dear Mads,

I want to personally thank you because you were one of LinkedIn's first million members (member number 397718 in fact!*). In any technology adoption lifecycle, there are the early adopters, those who help lead the way. That was you.

We hit a big milestone at LinkedIn this week when our 100 millionth member joined the site.

When we founded LinkedIn, our vision was to help the world's professionals be more successful and productive. Today, with your help, LinkedIn is changing the lives of millions of members by helping them connect with others, find jobs, get insights, start a business, and much more.  

We are grateful for your support and look forward to helping you accomplish much more in the years to come. I hope that you are having a great year.

Sincerely,

	Reid Hoffman Co-founder and Chairman LinkedIn

*Your member number is the number embedded in your LinkedIn profile URL (after "id=").
 

Centrepoint Sleep Out

Thursday 11^th November at the Old Spitalfields market.

Handmade colourful jewellery, tasty cakes and pastries, carefully crafted tops and bags, amongst many other items are being carefully wrapped up to boxes and packed away. The mixed aromas of moulded wine, rum cake and freshly made cappuccino also begin to fade. The traders has just finished their day at work, some of them are already on their way back home – their warm cosy home.

Whilst the Spitalfields traders are on their way back home, at the place of their stalls, a fence is being erected and there is a whole army of people wearing white T-shirts with orange circle at the back: Centrepoint, giving young homeless people a brighter future.

Fences, sleeping bags, loads of cardboard, badges, stage, volunteers and sleepers and even space for a Double-Decker bus in between. That is the set up for Centrepoint’s annual fund-raising event – Sleep Out (http://sleep-out.org.uk)

During one night, over 400 sponsored volunteers gave up their comfortable beds to sleep rough in the cold of night. The aim? To raise money and awareness to help a growing community of homeless young people achieve a roof over their head and create stable future.

DUCC member Mac Million took an active part providing video production support throughout the evening, night and morning. A team of volunteers were assembled using a mixture of young people from Centrepoint and students to film and edit the event. Most of the crew involved were first time camera operators and presenters, who with very little training threw themselves at the task.

To compliment the Mac Million team other sponsors stepped in to offer their generous help: Charles Gervais of Both Hemispheres provided still photography, Mike Smith from Alias Smith & Singh provided the video cameras, Nicholas Troen and Frank Yeung of Poncho No. 8 provided seated area and power for the editing suites and Geof Jones from Vueinti installed a Digital Signage system build around cardboard boxes.

After a long nights work the team managed to document entire event, capture performances and interview celebrities such including Lisa Maxwell of ITV’s Loose Women, Sara Cox, Ivan Gazidis the CEO of Arsenal Football Club and goalkeeper Lukasz Fabianski, Craig from Big Brother 1 and singers Dan Gillespie from The Feeling and Patrick Monahan the lead singer from Train, as well as Tres B.

The result of everybody’s joint efforts on the evening exceeded expectations and Centrepoint has so far raised over £150,000 to help Young Homeless People!

 

All the videos from the evening can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/user/CentrepointUK and you can also show your support here: http://www.facebook.com/centrepoint.charity

Re: Danish UK Chamber of Commerce

Please find my leader below for the November 2010 Newsletter for the Danish UK Chamber of Commerce:

Dear Members,

What an interesting month October was for anyone based in the UK. No-one could escape the over 81 Billion Pound budget saving measures by Chancellor George Osborne, by cutting costs, cutting Quangos and even cutting the iconic Harrier jets. Some doom-sayers would certainly claim that another recession is imminent, whilst others refer back to the time when government budgets were cut by Thatcher, it eventually led to Back Wednesday. Whether right or wrong, whilst businesses in the UK will be facing challenging times it will also offer entrepreneurial possibilities for those who are willing to make that extra effort. As much as the economy might need a respite from people wanting to go to school, be ill or have a pension, this will not change – same goes for the need for a roof over ones head, food, electricity, transport and other necessities. So yes, there will continue to be business opportunities.

And just one of those opportunities was witnessed in the beginning of October when our friends at Scan Magazine opened the doors to The Scandinavia Show 2010 (http://www.scandinaviashow.co.uk). It was an amazing feast of the best that Scandinavia has to offer in design, food, drinks, holidays, technology and drinks. And not least because DUCC was present too with a stand inspired by the wonderful place of Skagen, the most Northern place on the Danish peninsula (Jutland), it was manned by DUCC chairman Mr. Per Troen, office driver Manpreet, myself and the brave people from Team Denmark FC. The end result was that we connected with people that we would otherwise not have met and we even managed to sign up new members to the chamber. For those interested we brought a video production crew (Joanna) from Mac Million, who with Per went around interviewing and documenting the show. You can see the results on the DUCC web video channel (http://www.youtube.com/duccchannel).

As much as we are faced with tough choices in the current economic climate, we must not forget to step up to the challenge of helping others. Not being ashamed of plugging for charity myself, can I please use this opportunity to highlight Centrepoint’s Sleep-Out (http://sleep-out.org.uk) on Thursday the 11th of November in aid of giving homeless young people a future.  There will be a mix of celebrities, chief executives, city folks and others roughing it out for the night at the Old Spital Fields market. I will be there too with a crew with cameras and editing suites documenting events, surprise entertainment and interviewing people to be shown during the night on FaceBook and Youtube. Please get onboard, London’s homeless young people needs you now!  http://bit.ly/agArXb

Thank You
Mads

MD of Mac Million & Ducc Council Member

Avid Media Composer 5

We’ve just upgraded our Avid editing software to Media Composer 5! We love new toys and this latest instalment in the Mac Million arsenal is really exciting – ‘the fastest, most powerful editing tool available’. Avid truly is the industry standard and is the platform that most movies and TV is edited on. Between our Avid and Adobe systems, we are now pretty much ready for any project that comes through the door.

Avid have introduced drag-and-drop editing meaning that even a Final Cut or Premiere jRO junkie can benefit from Avid’s brilliant features. Media Composer 5 can work with a huge number of formats without any problems…

Our first project on the Avid is already under-way, it is mini documentary about hat designers for a charity auction in September in the aid of Homeless charities. 

And no more tedious transcoding of video shot on certain digital media. I say ‘tedious transcoding’ only because the general public would find the array of different video formats and the hows and whys of their use incredibly tedious. However to the type of geek that enjoys making a living from modern, digital video post-production, it is anything but. That is why we’re also thrilled about our recent upgrade to Canopus’ ProCoder 3.

ProCoder is the leading software transcoder and can take pretty much any type of video and turn it into another type, quickly and easily. It makes the hard work of dealing with regional formats (differences in size, speed and picture) a piece of cake and is an exceedingly handy tool of our trade.

In the office we have already started dreaming of to getting hold of the Matrox MX02 for HD video monitoring and a HUGE pair of monitors to stick on the wall! Then a new Canon XF305 which can shoot full HD video at a remarkable 50Mbps onto 2 swappable CF cards! After that a set of LED production lights! an HP Z800 with Nvidia Quadro FX5800!…honestly the shopping list is endless!

Re: Should the UK Film Council be saved? I'm not so sure...

This was originally posted yesterday under discussions on our new www.facebook.com/macmillionproductions page:

I am starting this subject in fear of falling out with all of my colleagues in the UK film industry. However, I am not sure that it is such a bad thing to abolish the UK film council. Please do feel free to disagree.

From my impressions and please note opinions; I don't think that the UK Film Council was set up to cover anything but the "elite" in UK Film-making. Granted, they did rightfully tick some boxes in order to cater for minorities, but more often than not, that only just stretched to short films. And IMHO they completely failed in getting Digital Cinema out to a wider audience in the UK. It took at least 3 years longer than it should have done, and it is debatable whether they in the end choose the right display technology. In any case, the political confusion helped put the breakers on High Definition in the UK for at least 4 years, and we are still playing catch-up. This wasn't helped either by then Chancellor Gordon Brown deciding to get rid of all foreign co-productions by making it near impossible to get co-funding under the new tax regime.

Yes, the UK Film Council has supported some financial successful movies, but out of the £160 million spent and over 900 films supported - how many actually made a decent return on investment.

So I say, scrap the UK Film Council. Encourage more micro budget film making. Only support movies with a strong business plan and bring back the tax-breaks for overseas producers (maybe just the Europeans) - this will help to get English co-productions to a wider audience and thereby bring money back into the industry. And one thing I never thought that I would hear myself say; lets remove VAT on Digital Cinema projection and sound equipment - this will hopefully help to re-vitalize cinemas and UK Digital Film Production. I.e. with the right Digital Equipment investment a micro-budget movie can be in the cinema on a slow Monday evening and out on DVD and download on a busy Friday there after.

Obviously I am a stake-holder in all of the above, but I also think that we shouldn't run to the defence of a film council that by my estimate hasn't delivered a proper commercial nor an artistic proposition to the UK film market.

However, I'm more interested in your opinion? Don't hold back :-)

Recycling

We are always eager to look for ways to make Mac Million a little greener. That’s why we signed up with The Laundry (www.thelaundry.biz), to collect our recycling every week straight from our offices.

The Laundry is also set to take away our old IT equipment, which in an attempt to claw back a bit of office space. We are sadly having to cast off several items, including a beautiful, vintage flatbed scanner and a modernist marvel of a laser printer whose drum doesn’t quite follow the beat, have been up for sale on our website for several months without any takers.

So this is your last chance to bag yourself a real bit of design history before they are taken away and environmentally bumped off – check out http://www.macmillion.com/forSale.htm.

The Laundry is the perfect solution for our recycling needs, making the whole process very easy. They supply us with colour coded bags that, once full, we leave outside the front door to be picked up. With regular collections and most of central London covered, being green is not a problem. On top of this, since you pay a single, reasonable price for a single, empty sack you avoid costly contracts, making it really cheap too! Enough said about their great rubbish collection.

We are well on our way of hitting the 95% recycling target we’ve set for ourselves. By also undertaking a thorough review of our energy consumption and CO2 emissions, Mac Million’s environmental-policy is not only saving us and thereby our client’s cash but also the planet!

Naked Bond on the River Thames

Re: Racing on the Thames

Helen does it again! Champagne reception at the London Eye Millennium Pier followed by a Bond style speed-boat race ending with Mel offering to jump in naked - what a great evening!

My latest Blog on the BNI Elite website

Re: Racing on the Thames

23 April 2010

By Mads Nybo Jorgensen

If one ever was to fear a boring Friday evening, fear not; our very own special party-maker Helen Wakeman-Jones arranged the perfect night out including spades of sunshine, a quiet cruise down the river Thames followed by a bit of mellow jazz music with an open bar.

14 members + 2 Elite partners in crime met early for a champagne reception on the Millennium Pier, underneath the London Eye. The champagne was chilled to perfection and so was the pier security - which was desperate to find out who had given permission to serve alcohol on their watch? Before they could react and impound our glasses, we had drunk the apple juice and so the evidence magically disappeared.

The group were suitably kitted out with windcheaters and lifejackets supplied and dresses by the lovely people from the London Rib Voyages company. Strict instructions were added that not at any time was one to pull the cord, unless in the water and the self-inflation mechanism found not to be working i.e. you're drowning!

Two Ribs were summoned to carry the group enlarged by a few tourists. I happened to find myself next to Mel with our backs to the steering and loudspeaker. Followed on by our kick boxing champion Lisa and Stephanie, Linky and Elizabeth, Richard with wife Judy and Alan and Sarah. I am guessing that the rest of the group went in the other boat.

Once boarded, safety checked and signed the disclaimers we raced from the eye up to Canary Wharf. Only slowing down for the Wapping Water Rats station - otherwise known as the Thames law enforcers. Once passed those guys, the Bond music was turned on full blast and the race between the boats was on - check out http://tinyurl.com/37aluqv for a full description of the boats - I can testify that if at enough speed, they will jump the waves.

Check out the pictures here: http://tinyurl.com/3ynkckh

On the return Louise, our Whitechapel based River guide talked us through all of the see-worthy sights on the River and the Houses of Parliament including the legal smoking room. My favourite was Belfast and that it still has the capacity to bombard the M1 - if we didn't already know that? http://tinyurl.com/3amqsof and the glassy building covering the view to the monument is originally build by an Italian Window Cleaner - yep, Louise was a wealth and inspiration of knowledge.

We also learned was that the River Thames is the cleanest Big City River in the world. Mel did later in the evening offer to change this through a promise of walking into the Thames without wearing any clothes - I want to use this opportunity, even at the risk of upsetting certain parts of the Elite chapter, to decline Mel's offer which was given under serious duress.

Upon disembarking the Ribs, we walked to the nearby Archduke for a treat of pub-grub, Jazz and a generous amount of wine. I have to confess that I never got to listen to the Jazz, which I think was the same for most, just too many people to catch up with outside of the usual 60 second fried egg and bacon setting. This was another superb event arranged by Helen Wakeman-Jones - Thank you very much! Let us all go and get her some referrals!!!

BNI YouTweet Competition

We have produced a video promoting our BNI Elite chapter. This is part of BNI's YouTweet challenge - details here:

http://www.bni.eu/bni-youtweet-competition.php

Without Prejudice on doing a Phoenix

Sorry, I've been a bit slack in updating my blog - not to worry, I am being told off for not doing it! - and rightfully so. Mange-2, sandwich, pen and paper is what makes this possible - soon I'll be modern and connect my Blackberry to the internet and email :-)

The really good news is that Mac Million has been busy throughout September and October. So busy that we for the whole year were down by 55% on the same period in 2008, whereas in October we we are up by 126% - that is a great result and a fantastic turn around. As a small business owner I always seem to battle with whether one should draw a line through the debts and "close" the company through a so called phoenix and start again with no debts.
It amazes me how easy this is to do, however recently both my landlord and Revenue and Customs have given me (more) time to pay off the company's debts; it is a very tough plan, but it has to work! To underscore the issue, one of my fellow BNI members told me this morning how he is about to loose nearly £20,000 to a client doing a phoenix - just shows how important it is to take responsibility for debts created and take any action necessary to honour commitments or other small business will topple like a game of dominos. Sadly we in the UK now have developed a culture where it is OK and far too easy to declare your company bankrupt. This is not a good role model for future generations of business people.

Onwards and upwards. Every day doing Network Marketing is a new day for me. I am getting more leads than I can manage and doing my best to find referrals for my colleagues - both in August, September and October I was one of the top referrers in my Chapter. Not setting aside the continued "ownership" of the blue "Notable Networker" badge, I am also seeing the truth of the BNI slogan "givers gain" - this morning I got three referrals. One of which includes being asked to be the keynote speaker at the December Annual General Meeting of a specialist association. This will, I promise, be very boring as I am not one to provoke anyone at such a meeting ;-)

Beside this flush of work I still get time to find new ways of hurting myself through exercise. I've been doing fairly well with a big dose of circuit training and boxercise. However, being one for not liking football and having not played the game regularly since school some 30 years ago. It only seems naturally that I should join an weekly indoor 5 aside game (sometimes we've been three on each side). So far I've managed to walk away from each match with markings on my legs and elbow - I hate to admit it, but I am enjoying the pace of the game and people that allows me to be a true amateur. Even though it is made up of tough Kivi's I still managed to score 3 goals in the last game - but it was not something that could be called beautiful...

Last night I also managed to play a game of Squash - so back to burning carbs - if only we hadn't gone to Ciao Bella for afters.

Taxing Times

I think that most small business owners will agree that the current times are some of the toughest times that we've experienced. I am splitting my time equally between dealing with creditors, debtors and marketing. It is difficult to decide what is the most important? It still takes me a good day to prepare and write a letter to a creditor, and often I just get a 2 line reply with either "Repeat of their previous request for info" or "yes, that will be ok" - however, it keeps the business alive.

One of the ways that I know that other businesses is having a hard time is by the high amount of sales calls and job applications that we receive on a daily basis. Actually, I think that I've become much nicer when I turn people down - maybe it is because I realize that it could be me or anyone that I know at the other end of that phone or email.

But I am really starting to like the marketing part, go out and meet new people, ask for introductions, think creatively about how you can help this person with Mac Million services whilst adding value to their business.

Tomorrow morning I am doing my 4 min introduction at my BNI Elite chapter. I've already received a fair bit of help from some of the more experienced members. So all I have to do, is to decide what is the most important services that we can offer that is tangible to the group members? In November I'll be doing a 10 min presentation for the same people - this I intend to be the big one - something that for better of worse won't be forgotten in the near future.

On a happier note, on Saturday it was by birthday and I received a lot of good wishes, cards and people were queuing up to celebrate it with me. Had a lovely breakfast with friends at Mange 2, followed by one hour of phone calls, an hour in the gym (hill programme on the treadmill - level 16 at 6.2 speed for 45 min.) and then I went to have dinner and a movie with a couple of very dear friends in West London. They intercepted me in Hammersmith and took me to their tailors; T.K. Max - I had an amazing lesson in designer clothes by a former fashion editor, and was kitted out to look the business. The dinner afterwards was fab too - always involves discussions on a high intellectual level - not sure I get all of it, but I like it and love it :-)

Niels Bohr gave me my quote of the week:
"Prediction is very difficult, especially if it's about the future."

Blog Me

I started writing a few months ago about my life inside and outside of Mac Million on the Touch London Business blog. Unfortunately they decided to stop me from posting due to restrictions on how many posts that you are allowed too put up each month... I did ask via their website and email for an upgrade and inquired about costs for doing this, but they never responded - if only we had soo much business that we could ignore new clients, then I would indeed be a very happy bunny.

This summer has been really slow, so I've spent my time equally on taming the paperwork, marketing and putting more hours in at the gym. I've started reading "Time Management" by Polly Bird, published by the chartered management Institute. Actually, I'm trying to live it, rather than just read it - after many, many + a bit more years of failure in this field, I'm hoping to get both my precious time and paper mountain under control. The result so far (half way through chapter three) is that I know the color of my office desk and carpet - eventually everything will be paperless, or at least in some form of organised lever arch files.

For too many years Mac Million has enjoyed word of mouth marketing. However, not only with the crunch but also with our business changing so rapidly, including our business model, I've had to recognise that many of yesterdays clients won't be the same tomorrow. So to be more proactive a number of very good and special offers has been generated in form of Direct Mail Marketing and on our website (http://www.macmillion.com/specialoffers.htm).

A direct result of this was getting an invitation to the July visitors day at our local BNI (Elite) chapter. BNI (http://www.bni-europe.com/uk/index.php) is a concept build around doing referrals between businesses. There are over 6,200 chapters Worldwide and the attraction is that each chapter only have one person of each type of business/profession. So I will never find myself in the room pitching against another video production company. However, there are a Pr, Web and a design company that I can work + people in the area of accountancy and legal services that could use video too. The concept is simple, when you sign up you agree to turn up at the weekly breakfast meeting to give a 1 minute presentation + hear a longer presentation by a pre-selected member. The short presentation is an excellent opportunity to highlight a specific services + ask the group for specific contacts. Yes, it costs money to join and to eat the breakfast, but I got my first paid job from the induction meeting to BNI + I am busy meeting 1-2-1 with all the other members - work is definitely being created as a direct result of this.

Then there is the work that I am doing in the gym - trying to sort my soul and body out before a big milestone next year. Found another member, Mirko, who is introducing me to Push-ups, Burkees and Circuit Training - his comment is that there is a reason for why the military has been exercising in this style for thousands of years - I'm still hurting...

Anyway, got to leave some content for the next blog :-)