It's not often you get a letter like this...
A couple of months ago, we were lucky enough to get a nice letter from Lord Young and Sir Terry Leahy (ex Tesco boss) as one of the UK’s most exciting 250 companies.
Here it is...
Top 250
And the day arrived when it was time for these 250 companies to meet in Liverpool and hear a selection of incredible speakers help to motivate these entrepreneurs to bigger and better things.
Ticket to ride
So our CEO Oli Christie took the train up to Liverpool the night before the event and the sun shone on a glorious evening in Albert Dock - here’s the scene with a nice cool refreshing lager.
Twist and shout
Liverpool is the home of the Beatles of course and Oli’s hotel was slap bang next to the Beatles Story museum and their “London Eye”.
Hit for six
On arriving at the fantastic conference venue in Liverpool, Oli picked up his programme for the day and had a quick browse through the pages and whatdyaknow, there was a nice feature on Neon Play and we were one of only six companies out of the 250 that were featured. So that was nice.
From the sub’s bench
As luck would have it, the day before he’d gone up, Oli had been asked to be a last-minute replacement on one of the panels from someone from LinkedIn, so this gave Oli access to the Green Room.
Now this room wasn’t green and it was barely a room - more of a corridor with a door, but nonetheless, the great news was that this gave Oli access to all the truly incredible speakers on the day.
Did I mention that I met...
Without wanting to namedrop horribly (perish the thought), here are some of the fascinating people Oli met on the day.
Jimmy Wales - founder of Wikipedia
Robert Peston - BBC business rotweiler
Declan Curry - charming Irish BBC business journalist
Katie Derham - lovely ITV news presenter
Paul Lindley - Founder of Ella’s Kitchen kiddie food company
Martha Lane Fox (or Baroness Lane-Fox of Soho) - lastminute.com founder
Sarah Wood - Founder of Unruly Media
Thea Green - Founder of Nails Inc
Doug Richards - ex Dragon’s Den
Paddy Bishopp and Scott Russell - Paddy and Scott's Slow Roasted Coffee
Edward Wray - Founder of Betfair
Charles Morgan - Chairman of Morgan Cars
Renaud Visage - Founder of Eventbrite
Edwina Dunn - Founder of Dunhumby
Sean Fitzpatrick - Former All Blacks captain
What a twit
To add to the merriment, Oli had “entered” a competition to win a #beerwithbilimoria via Twitter. This basically meant that anyone who tweeted that hashtag had the chance for a 30 minute chat with Lord Bilimoria, who founded Cobra Beer, that fine Indian lager.
Lucky devil
And as luck would have it, Oli got a call saying his tweet had been pulled out of the digital hat. So Oli and Lord B had a great chat about Neon Play and the success and challenges we face. He also talked about his diverse portfolio of roles and how busy he is.
Plus he and Oli discussed the merits of having a trusty old favourite car - Lord B drives an old Mercedes with 100,000 miles on the clock and Oli’s rusty VW Passat is also a trusty servant.
Read all about it
So that was a great end to an incredible, hectic, busy, stimulating, humbling and fun day with some truly interesting people. It was great to get the name of Neon Play out there.
Rent a quote
Oli Christie, CEO of Neon Play said, “It was a real honour to meet so many genuinely successful people and to speak to them about what made them successful and the challenges and aspirations they have. Having a proper one-to-one chat with Lord Bilimoria was a real privilege and that really gave me some food for thought. All in all, it was a great day and I felt proud to represent Neon Play on the day”
