A short history first though. Historically my business model has been one of consultancy, or contracting as its known in the business, and since 2003 its been a great model. Last year I decided to change and move to what I’m calling a “Software House” business model, my reasons being the looming downturn and wanting to grow my business into something sustainable. I reinvented the company and since then, thanks to the good people at BRITE, I’ve reinvented again into a business model that works.

So how did BRITE help me with this? Well here’s the overview:

• Strategising
  This has been a brilliant eye opener to me. Introducing me to the world of SWOT analyses and other tools. This has allowed me to identify the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats as I worked out my new business plan.
• Business Planning
  I’ve managed to formulate a business idea (Web 2.0 app) and with my training take it from conception to the point where it became obvious it wouldn’t work in about three weeks, so it was worth exploring but I didn’t waste a whole lot of time (or money) on it either. Never the less I learned a lot in those few weeks, experience I’ve carried forward into an idea that is starting to bear fruit.
• Networking
  I’ve entered into a “strategic alliance” with another tech company, who’s business is complimentary to my own, so we can generate new business for each other. Outside of that I’ve joined a BNI networking group which is also generating new business. My training allowed me to hit the ground running as far as networking is concerned as I didn’t have to learn the “hard way” i.e. Trial and Error.
• Sales Skills
  All important. Not everybody is a natural sales person but you may be better at it than you think. Some formal training however brings up the of confidence levels and that goes a long way when meeting potential clients.
• Mentoring
  A key part of the programme, which is in the near future for us, and I definitely report back on that.

BRITE is run as a joint venture between FÁS and the Dublin County Enterprise Boards, of which there are four, and can be found at http://www.dceb.ie/networking/brite-ict-network. In recent weeks, as its conference season, I’ve spoken to a number of SME software houses like my own and its seems a lot of the successful ones are former participants in the programme. I can understand they’re success too.

Speaker selection on the day was mostly great, deciding who to see took some internal debate I have to admit, some speakers weren’t so great. I’ll name no names but I had now idea that footprint recognition software could be so boring. In fairness to that particular speaker they did get into their stride towards the end.

Finding out about the incubator programmes in the country was of particular interest to a lot of attendees imo. Representatives were present from:

• NovaUCD - Dublin
• DIT’s Hot House - Dublin
• LEAP - Limerick
• WESTBIC - Galway

All excellent programmes, if you’re a tech start-up it would be worth having a chat with at least one of them. A couple of points on funding and incubation of note, there seems to be a lack of support after year one for companies, the above programmes are aware of this and putting solutions in place, and that companies need purchase orders as much as they need funding. These could be and should be coming from the public sector, fat chance of that with the current cuts.

Personally I think the most important part of the day was getting to meet like minded people, Robin Blandford from ByteSurgery and Iarfhlaith Kelly of Webstrong in particular. They seem to be a step or two ahead of me in that they’ve completed development on their projects and have gotten their businesses out of the home office (read: spare bedroom).

What’s really exciting though is the innovation coming out of Dublin at the moment. Its a great time with small entrepreneurs starting small tech businesses which have great potential. One message I took from the Innovation Accelerator is that although your current venture mightn’t attract investment its a mandatory step on the way to a venture that will, see RevaHealth’s recent funding for an example.

So here is the the new Tyrolean blog. We’ll be commenting on the web in general, posting tutorials and adding stuff we like.