It’s Sunday night. Strictly’s on the telly downstairs and I’m up in my home office finishing off a couple of things ahead of what’s likely to be another incredibly busy week. We’ve just finished our online training guide for the new Humax Eye HD Cloud security camera (which we sneaked into the market as no one had any idea that we were working on this until the news went live on Friday 14th Oct) and in a minute I’ll be polishing my good shoes ready for tomorrow’s second train journey to London in seven days.

“Alan’s Big Mistake” – one of our training films for retra’s online retailer training is played to an audience at the retra Annual Conference 2016.

Last week it was the retra Annual Conference (retra is always spelled with a lower case ‘r’ in case you’re thinking it’s a typo), where we held court with our clients until the very early hours, and tomorrow it’s the electrical retail industry’s prestigious ERT Awards 2016, where, along with retra, we’ll find out who’s going to walk away with the coveted ‘Training Award’.

Of course, I’d love it if it came to us. And I’ll be eating my 5-star lunch at the fabulous Connaught Rooms with a tight knot of tension in my stomach lining. But these things can’t be rushed, and they can’t be allowed to dominate our motivations for doing what we do – which is to help our clients’ businesses succeed through excellent training.

However, we made the final! Seriously that’s no mean feat! T21UK has been around for not quite two years and it’s truly humbling to be recognised by a panel of learned experts for building a solution that has value to the industry – specifically our online training for retra and retracare. We’re in esteemed company too: we’re the little guys sitting between three global brands with massive resources – one of whom, ironically, we’ve been in talks with for projects for next year.

Whatever happens, I intend to enjoy the day. It’ll be good to catch up with some old friends (who I haven’t seen since last Tuesday’s conference!), enjoy some fabulous food and take part in ERT’s legendary music quiz – to which I think everything else will be secondary.

And I believe the What HiFi Awards 2016 are on later the same day…