NGTV: That's A Wrap!

We’ve come full circle! One whole year since our first virtual event, the Summer Festival, and last week we held our fourth (and likely final) online event for the Network Group community.

This event saw our executive team together for the first time since January 2020, a welcome change from bi-weekly zoom calls. The chance to meet and talk face-to-face with one another brings with it the hope we will be able to host a full in-person event before the year is out.

We go live to our roving reporter

We changed the pace for NGTV, opting to condense the event into two days rather than spreading the content out over a week. The format change mimics our in-person events closer, giving us a taste of what’s to come in October.

Day one of NGTV, we broadcasted live from the studio with the exec team. Changing up the method of delivery brought a new found engagement and excitement to the event, and our first experience of a hybrid event as opposed to a purely virtual experience.

We kicked off with a welcome from Chairman Perry Ashby, with updates from the wider executive team before a quick ad break took us straight into a panel discussion on the future of the workspace. Julian Thompson joined NG MD David Tulip in the studio while guests Neil Jensen, Chris Derham, and Chris Ward beamed in from afar.

After another quick ad break, NG member Adam Morris took part in an interview with David on his recent experience of M&A having sold his business. NG members took this opportunity to learn best practice and gain insights into Adam’s first-hand experience.

A quick word from our sponsor

We broke for lunch, with a chance to get some fresh air and re-fill our brand-new NG Chilly's bottles

Back from lunch and another virtual guest, Greg Jones of Datto gave us an MSP market update, what cyber resilience is, and a general partner update. One final ad break, and we were back with the exec for our closing session and ‘question time’. We wrapped up day one giving everyone plenty of time to get home for England vs. Denmark in the semi-finals of the Euros!

Take two… action!  

Day two saw us reverting back to a fully-virtual space, with a few tired delegates after the previous night’s footballing excitement. Roy Jenks and Sam Rose of Notorious Online were up bright and early educating our members on best practice around social media for business, as well as which platforms they actually need to be on.

Our second session of the day featured our partner-led roundtables; as we were joined by AppRiver, Ingram Micro, Exertis, and Fujitsu for 30-minutes each. Back down the marketing track for our third session, Matt Hodgkinson of Total Growth Ownership shared his knowledge on performance positioning and increasing your conversion rate.

A quick lunch break later and we were back with our member-led roundtables. SonicWall and Chris Blunt of brokenStones hosted an informative session on security, Ben Thomas-Fane of Morgan & Morgan introduced members to the MPS program as well as updating current users, and Sharon Billingham of CWL Systems talked us through managing your business’ health through finance.

We had the pleasure of hosting Paul Dippell, of Service Leadership Inc, from the US on Thursday afternoon. Paul led an insightful session educating the members on a variety of topics from MSP tools, to the importance of measuring your business.

Staying in the US, our sister company Technology To Go hosted a session with Liongard on leveraging data to enhance your security. After several successful collaborations with Liongard, this was once again open channel-wide. Scott Davis led us through how to learn the true value of your data.

And the winner is...

With a short break between Liongard and our team-game finale, we had just enough time to jump on the CRN Sales & Marketing Awards live stream to see ourselves be named winner of the inaugural Best Online/Hybrid Event 2021 Award for our Red Carpet Revenge event in November 2020!

Company Fortunes was yet another international affair for the Group; with Liongard back again from the States, Privatise joining us from Israel, and Nick Paul of ITQuoter showing true commitment by joining us at 4:30am from New Zealand! Inbay made up our fourth team, and our winners of the night – congratulations team Inbay!

Network Group would like to again extend our thanks to our sponsoring partners for joining us and sharing their expertise throughout the week: Alcatel-Lucent, AppRiver, ConnectWise, Datto, Exertis, Fujitsu, Inbay, Ingram Micro, ITQuoter, Liongard, Sol Distribution, SonicWall, Terra Computer, and Privatise.

Our next event will take place on 20th October 2021 in Brighton. Keep an eye on our website and social media for more information.

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