3800+ pioneers and pilgrims

Octo Members
24 November 2020
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A short read. 

As ever, I will start with a huge thank you from the whole team.

In just over two years from launch we have grown to over 3000 members.  That’s you and your fellow professionals who took a look and decided to stay. You, our pioneers and pilgrims are always welcome here on Octo. You decided to join, check us out and become involved in so many ways and we can’t thank you enough.

 “We are the Pilgrims; we shall go
always a little further” – James Elroy Flecker, from The Golden Road to Samarkand

In just those short few months of your support we have posted hundreds of your submitted articles as well as hundreds of our own from Gary ShepherdJohn LappinSam Shaw and others, produced well over 500 videos, mainly interviews with members or others of note and of value to members, many podcast episodes, supported your conferences and events as sponsors and media partners and continually chased you for ideas and opinion to help us continue on our journey together.

We really mean it when we say that we set out to build a community of practitioners by practitioners.  Sharing insights and viewpoints across our differing roles to help inform us all and hopefully see each others points of view.  The vision was always to have a broad church of members, not a specialist niche, there are lots of great examples of those out there already. We wanted to bring different disciplines together for informed discourse and by your feedback you agree with our approach.

We love the high standard of courteous debate we see and how so many of you contribute to it and we appreciate your willingness to become involved and, when necessary, give us a nudge. Bad behaviour is pretty much non-existent and this is, in my opinion at least, because of the professional approach you all take to being involved. From our side, we have rigorously enforced our code of conduct on the rare occasions it has been necessary and we are more than happy to bar entry to those seeking to make trouble or remove members who don’t share the values rightly demanded of us by members.

To continue on our journey of improvement we already have a larger extended team covering production, membership, writing and interviewing.  This is because we love to showcase great people, good ideas and introduce you to each other.

We are continually adding to a comprehensive live events programme across topics that we have been asked by you to explore.

Based on your feedback, we have added to the list of topics and we now have CPD streams and we have become an accredited CPD provider to ensure that what we are producing is actionable, educational and meets the standards required to be useful for your purposes and roles.  We always aim to make this CPD as engaging, media rich and actionable as possible – if we slip in this, just let us know.

Always seeking to innovate we recently held our first multi-speaker webinar followed by our ever popular virtual drinks. The feedback from that session was fantastic so we are aiming to do more.  A huge thank you to Adrian Murphy and the Murphy Wealth team (go check out their new website), Neil BageMark Locke and Mike Jones for being such willing volunteers to see how it all worked out.

Based on the feedback, we will be bringing more of this type of live event to you to add to our Hot Topics, Tune-ups and Virtual Drinks sessions so it is always worth checking out our Events Topic to see the ever growing list of events aimed at keeping members informed.  If you have not attended or want to know more please just give me a shout.

We have a lot more planned for 2021 based on your feedback.  To further explore what you want from us do look out for the forthcoming Big Member Ask which will be a way for us to continue to be the community of choice for professionals by professionals.

Thanks once again, here if you need me or want to give feedback directly to me.

Lee Robertson

Author.

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