A Yorkshire Business Family – Blood and Business

My brother Ciaran

I established Webanywhere back in 2003 and soon afterwards employed first my brother Ciaran and later on my sister Sinead and younger brother Conor. Whilst being in business with siblings can be interesting the talents and loyalty they have brought has given the business a real spine over the years.

Siblings often grow up teasing one another, competing for attention, and fighting over toys or TV time. They can simultaneously be the best of friends and the worst of enemies. And when they run companies together as adults, those longtime conflicts can easily re-emerge, threatening both the business and an otherwise close personal relationship.

Ciaran and Sean Of course there are sometimes tensions and disagreements like in any family run organisation but these are vastly outweighed by the multitude of benefits a family business can bring.

Shared blood, shared passions might just be the perfect combination.

Our Values and Our Purpose Guide Us

Learnanywhere - Simple and Powerful

Running a high growth tech company comes with it’s benefits and it’s challenges. Whenever we have difficult decisions to make in our business we try and look at the issues from a customer point of view and then use our company values to guide us all the way.

Our purpose is to create jobs in the communities in which we operate and this is how I measure success. Our values are to be flexible, have fun, to contribute, to go the extra mile and to learn all the time.

Webanywhere believes in worthwhile work, people are allowed to work the way they want to (within certain guidelines) and we keep celebrating our successes as a winning team.

We hope you as a customer share some of our values and we look forward to working with you in the future. Our goals are stretching and ambitious – we love our customers and we want to grow our business – let’s keep creating lots of jobs together.

It’s Showtime – BETT Show 2013 & Learning Technologies 2013

A very Happy New Year to you all!

We’ve had a fast start to 2013, with more new starters and some exciting developments
approaching fruition – more on that another time…

January sees Webanywhere at the two big ICT exhibitions this month. We’ll be at both BETT and Learning Technologies, at Excel London Jan 30th- Feb 2nd, and Olympia 2 London 29th-30th Jan respectively, with a bigger and better presence than ever.

I’ll be at both shows, and am relishing the chance to chat to customers and non-customers alike. Our stands will be manned by our fantastic team of e-learning specialists and developers, so if you would like to ask us a question or see our products in action, make sure you stop by stand F280 at BETT or stand 122 at Learning Technologies. To book a meeting in advance, click here for BETT and here for Learning Technologies.

I recently had the pleasure of another trip down to Google UK headquarters. As a Google
Enterprise partner, and Google Apps for Education reseller we really value our relationship (and internally Webanywhere’s use of Google Apps for Business allows us to communicate and collaborate in a way that wouldn’t be possible otherwise).

I am delighted to announce that Webanywhere and Google will be conducting a joint
seminar at Learning Technologies – Stretch your organisation further with Google Apps for Enterprise, examining amongst other things the integration of this powerful suite of cloud based tools with Totara LMS.

We hope you can make it to at least one of the shows, and that they provide you with new ideas and inspiration for the coming year.

Merry Christmas from Webanywhere

I would like to wish all our customers and partners past, present and future a very Merry Christmas and a happy, prosperous New Year.

I would also like to thank the brilliant Webanywhere team for their many and varied contributions to (another) record year. Our office Christmas Party is this afternoon (and most likely long into the evening…) and is set to be a cracker!

Look out for some exciting new developments from Webanywhere in the New Year, but for now however you are spending the festive period, have a great time.

Silicon Valley Comes to the UK

I was delighted to receive an invite to attend SVC2UK 2012 – Silicon Valley Comes to the UK 2012– and last week travelled to Cambridge to take part in this annual meet up of UK business leaders, Cambridge University students and the cream of Silicon Valley.

The event brings together digital entrepreneurs, investors, thought leaders and the brightest students of Cambridge University to debate, discuss, create and fund the technology of tomorrow.

As the sector under the spotlight this year was Education Technology, the event was of particular value to me. My main focus was the ‘Scale Up’ theme of the event – examining how to transition growing tech companies into internationally operating concerns with turnovers in the hundreds of millions.

SVC2UK+2

Webanywhere are certainly ‘scaling up’ as we broaden our horizons internationally, and so I was invited to join the CEO workshop event comprising of leaders of companies on track for rapid growth, who are looking to accelerate that growth.

I was inspired to speak with some of those who have been there and done it on the grandest scale, including Megan Smith, VP, Google [x], Rahul Vohra, Founder and CEO of Rapportive and Angela Lin, Head of YouTube Education. As you may imagine, I came away with plenty of food for thought. Something that struck a chord with me was that the best companies empower their staff to act like the CEO – to own their issues, to take control of their projects and to be proactive. If you have talented people, provide the space to be creative and you will be richly rewarded.

I also got chance to sit in on a very lively debate: The Future of Learning – What will students’ lives look like in 10 years time?, covering topics such as the flipped classroom, learning platforms and social and mobile learning.

The main thought left stuck in my head when leaving Cambridge was the need to stay dissatisfied. There are always opportunities to improve your offering, there is always a new challenge to stretch your ability, and always another horizon to aim for.

No pain no gain