Last Wednesday night https://wpengine.staging.linkedfinance.com/ were delighted to be part of the monthly 121 Networking event at Dublin’s Westin Hotel. A community of marketing and business professionals, the 121 Marketing Network aim to build meaningful relationships with their peers.

Their monthly meet-ups, known also as the ‘The First Wednesday Club’ often profile Irish-based businesses, which gave us a nice opportunity to show what LinkedFinance is all about.

We added an additional task to last week’s meet-up inviting people to bring along their favourite business or motivational book (in exchange for a free drink which during a hot summer’s evening proved a valuable barter!). As more people arrived a colourful, well-thumbed pile of books mounted up.

Marc, Peter and Conor were on hand to talk through the LinkedFinance process, the success stories to date and the business’ plans for the future. There was a wide mix of business people from owner-managers to big-brand representatives, all eager to understand more about Ireland’s first crowd-funding platform.

Some of the most common queries on the night related to the process itself; how does it all work?

Marc felt that people had done some research before the event: “People had checked out what we do before they arrived and were excited by our unique crowd funding model. Also the concept of the business book swap engaged a lot of communication and fun”.

However they were also keen to understand the figures involved: “A lot of questions related to the interest rate on the business loans. We were very clear that with the LinkedFinance model, lenders are in control; they decide individually plus it depends on their individual risk assessment and engagement with the business”

We’re looking forward to more events like this over the coming months –stay tuned and hopefully we’ll meet you there!

Written by Lorraine Griffin, ie.linkedin.com/in/lorrainegriffin