What if we bring PETALS people together?

Just add a few brainwave ideas for the petals project. So what I'm going to try and do a bit more frequently now when I've got these ideas in my head, I want to just record something and then I'm going to tidy it up a little bit around the edges, but not too much, and put it out on the podcast, the YouTube, all those sort of things. So this sow season is coming to an end now. We are, well, we're pretty much into autumn now. That's why I'm trying to align the seasons with everything we do. Petals feels more natural, feels more on theme with the whole flowers and allergies and stuff like that. I want to try to start thinking about now. It's that time of year when you start thinking about next year. You know, we've gone through 2025. We've got the last three months or so to kind of work with. We've got stuff that we're going to finish this season next, this autumn season. It's all around building the, the premium plans, the plus plans for Petals. We're offering free forever to all our current accounts. These are grandfathered teams that are part of Petals ecosystem and because they've been part of that early days, we're going to grandfather them into the paid plans anyway. But what we will be doing in 26 is launching our pay plans which will provide a lot more functionality. It'll give us some, some sort of income to work with as well so we can actually build new things, get more exciting things going, more feature rich things as well. So this is not a freebie forever thing. This is something we wanted to kind of get the ball rolling and see what works. And now we're getting to that point with our all our users where we realize there is something on this. Anyway, what got me thinking about the next year 26, I was trying to work out what, what I could do to play into some of my strengths. Some of those are around community. I've talked about this in the past on the podcast on other things that I'm very much a community person. For the past 20, 30 years of my career, I've always been trying to tap into community. Even going back to my uni days in my final year of university, I was all about creating a community around our cohort. University is relevant for me. This week I've literally just dropped my son off at his university. He's joined the University of Manchester. He's doing lots of good stuff. He's making his networks and all that. It just Rewound me back to those days for me. Anyway, let's bring it back to now. Tomorrow I'm going to an event locally about neurodiversity in the workplace. And it got me thinking again. How do I use my skills, my knowledge, my personal experiences to kind of share and help others and ideally connect. This is what I'm going for to the event hall tomorrow in 2026. I think there's something in this. I would like to run an event at some point next year, maybe spring, maybe summer. Let's think about the timings later. I want to bring together the organizations that are using petals. I know this from the app that we've built. There are some really big names that are using this now. I'm not going to give anything away because of all that data protection stuff, but there are some very big UK companies and international companies that are using this concept. They sign it to the app, they're using it regularly. I, I can see it's doing something and it's helping them. I would like to bring these people together to have like a panel conversation, a fireside chat, maybe do a little few case studies around how they've introduced petals and how it's helped their, their organization grow. Open up some really interesting thought provoking questions for the community as well. I want to host this in the uk. I want to host it in the Midlands as well. I think that's it's an underrepresented area when it comes to the taxane if Milton Keynes Tech week this week for those that are in the area, which is part of the reason I'm going to this event tomorrow. But I'm also conscious that my routes are from the West Midlands, the East Midlands. I want to take it back up there to Birmingham. I want to make sure that it's an easy commutable for many organizations. There are some organizations on the app that are actually based in Birmingham so that'll make it a little bit easy for them to access. And then what I'd like to do is look for sponsorship as well to make it a real event. Could get some sort of endorsements, we can do some little promos here and there, but really it's about, it's really for the organizations out there to talk about how they've used petals, what's been their winning successes, what have been their challenges, what would they like to do with petals, how they are thinking about team health as the whole. And what I'd like to do is with that as well is record some content. This Content can go out on these channels, it can go out on my own channels. We might even rebrand it to something else. But I'm also like playing to my strengths. I love making content. I love the idea of sharing stuff out there, playing into the podcast ecosystem or other channels wherever it's relevant, and then extend that community. It's food for thought for now. I'm still working out the details. I've literally just had a brainwave while I was in the gym. It was one of those moments when why haven't I thought this before? So that's my brain dump of the idea for now. I'm going to go and have think about it a bit more throughout the next few days and then I'll probably come back to it later in the week when I've got some fresher thoughts and off the back of the event I'm attending tomorrow, which might give me some other ideas about how we might facilitate it, organize it and make it a reality. I know it's not easy to organize these sort of events. It might be straightforward to get the content providers, which is often the hard part. But what I often find is if it's a free event, attendance is quite low. So just giving them people a reason to go, putting a very low entry price mark that covers like food for example, but that encourages people to actually attend. And this will be lot, sort of either a midweek event or end of week event so we can have a little bit of a shindig afterwards. But I'm really, I'm really keen to make the reality in 2026 and that give us a chance to build up our user base of the app as well. Just to be completely but blunt and honest about this, I want to make sure that the petals up is being used. We spend a lot of time building this. Brian and Adrian put a lot of heart and effort into this. I have with myself as well. It's all been for the greater good. We don't make any money out of this right now and it's been a labor of love for the past three years for me. I think it's time to turn up a little bit, make it a bit more of a, a business model, but not being money grabbing. I'm not that kind of person at all. So there we go, there's the thoughts. I will put this out there and I would love to get some ideas of any organizations that would like to be part of this journey in 2026. Anyone that's interested in attending to understand a bit more about petals, but also just play to my strengths and enjoy the journey. It's not going to be easy, but it'll be worth it in the end.