Over the next couple of months we’ll be bringing you the personal thoughts and tips from Irish entrepreneur James Winans, founder & CEO of Vanguard Beer Collective. James is currently taking part in The AIB Start-Up Academy in association with The Irish Times as Her.ie and JOE.ie's wild card winner. You can check out the first instalment of his diary here. Read James' second diary entry below: Have you ever had a conversation with a hypnotherapist? It’s not that the conversation is that different. It’s just once you know the person you're speaking to possesses these almost mystical mind control powers, you spend half the conversation analysing whether or not “you’re under.” Well, our mentor for last week’s AIB Start-Up Academy, Sean Weafer, is not only a trained hypnotherapist, but also a psychologist and a master of neuro-linguistic programming. Talk about scary - this guy knows what’s going on in your head before you do. In this week’s presentation, Sean guided us through sales and negotiation techniques and advanced client meeting management. While those titles might sound a bit dry, this was absolutely fascinating stuff. Sales and negotiation was first on the menu. It quickly became apparent that this is not about manipulation or hard selling. It is about listening to, and even more importantly, understanding your customer. The second part of the day was all about getting the most out of meetings. While it seems quite obvious in retrospect, a key point I took away was the importance of knowing what you want to get out of a meeting before you go into it. I left The Irish Times building on Monday really excited about putting my newly acquired skills to the test. I also left wondering whether the day had really been as interesting as I thought or if I had been hypnotised to believe that it was. I’m still not 100 per cent sure, but think I’m ready to sell ice to the eskimos either way! I also took away some interesting insights from our finance course with Gerry Delaney. This was the course I wish I could have taken when starting up my business. This course answered every question I had about business planning, forecasting and creating cash flow projections. While much of this I have learned already through necessity, what I found extremely useful was using KPIs to monitor ongoing performance. I met with my accountant the next morning with a list of KPIs that I was now interested in tracking. My accountant was rather bemused and asked me what book I had been reading to be suddenly so interested in KPIs! We also had a great talk from Padraig Masterson, Lead SME RM at AIB. It was very useful to hear from someone inside the bank what exactly they are looking for when SMEs engage with them. Padraig also advised us to engage with the bank on a monthly basis to keep them informed as to what is going on. This is not something I would have ever considered doing before as I normally call my RM when I need some funding – apparently, NOT the way to do it. Until next time, James For more about Vanguard Beer Collective check out their website, Twitter and Facebook pages.