Starter for Ten - Seeing the light
Did?you know that the PSTN Switch Off is the biggest change to business communications since its implementation? Nope, nor did we... So to prepare you, we've found a?great article?with all the salient facts. Something that we did know about was that one of the top five emerging ecosystems for VC funding was Manchester-Liverpool. London remains top of the pops as Europe's leading tech startup ecosystem seeing an upswing of exits over $50mllion in 2022. Read on to find the full report.
And lastly, I am a great believer in contextual repositioning - or stealing with pride! The best way to improve anything is to find those that do it brilliantly and emulate them. So I always scan The?Forbes World's Most Influential CMO?list to not only see who has made the list, but to also understand what it is that they do so well. As they say, sometimes, complicated times beg for simplification - to find the best way to 'hear' the right signals in today's explosion of noise and be able to adapt to changing attitudes, behaviours and events in real-time. To simply influence the decision to buy.
Have a good week ahead.
Growth and resilience: The global startup ecosystem report
Earlier this month the Global Startup Ecosystem Report 2023 was launched in Amsterdam. Looking at data from 3.5million startups across over 290 global ecosystems, the report provides new insights, including the impact of inflation, talent attraction, trends in global VC funding. There is a lot to digest, but some headlines include:
Are you burning out?
Natasha takes up the pen this week to discuss more in-depth; burnout and what is really means.
Last week I talked about the recent Xero research which found that overall, small business owner wellbeing is currently below that of the general population. This was seen as a global problem, rather than a local one.
Some of the factors contributing to this included business-related stress spilling over into personal lives; the ability to take time to rest and recover; undertaking fulfilling work (or a lack of it); and access to affordable counselling or peer support. I briefly touched on the topic of burnout but what do we mean by burnout and how do we know if it’s happening to us or not.
It’s a question I get asked a lot and I think it’s an important area to discuss - both based on the concern that people have that it may be happening to them or because it actually is. It was based on my own burnout experience around six years ago that I became interested in the topic and with the World Health Organisation now classing burnout as an occupational phenomenon, burnout seems to have become a normalised part of everyday life.
But what do we mean by burnout? It’s generally understood to stem from “chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed” and is characterised by feelings of energy depletion or exhaustion; feelings of negativity or cynicism related to one's job; and a lack of belief in one’s own ability to deliver what’s needed.
Hubspot AI
For those of you that use HubSpot, it is definitely worth finding out more about its new AI tools. The new content assistant is an native integration and is super intuitive popping up on all areas of HubSpot with its?little lightning bold icon. You can use any of the prompts, in a similar fashion to ChatGPT to rewrite, expand, summarise of change the tone of your copy just by highlighting the section you wish to change.
And remember, if you don't use HubSpot you can access this platform at a vastly reduce price by making use of our?partner discount.