The 10,000 hour rule and Calum Brannan's RSI

Oh how we laughed today when one of the team brought our attention to an article on the Sky Blog, entitled "Will Calum Become UK's Mark Zuckerberg?"

For a start we couldn't believe what a total mug Christer Holloman must be to have swallowed Calum's bulls**t.

Amongst the cherry-ripe quotes that we loved were:

"Last week I got a chance to catch up with one of UK’s most promising young entrepreneurs to see what he was up to these days."

"promising" yes, he's great at promising, it's just the delivery he has trouble with!

"........runs three businesses and employs a small army of assistants."

Like hell he does!!  What a load of cobblers!  In his head maybe, but in reality he's run away from Coventry and come down to London to live in a renovated piano factory in Camberwell to try and make some money, leaving all his work colleagues in the shit back home to such a degree that they're closing down CBJL's plush serviced offices and James Leavesley, the "JL" of CBJL seems to have been unceremoniously dumped.   Could CBJL be just the latest in a very long string of company failures for the skinny boy from Coventry?

"...........Social Helium, where he already has racked up an impressive list of clients"

Another lie!!  Social Helium doesn't even have a proper website and, in all probability, any clients it has were nicked from a previous company where he's still the subject of an investigation for a number of breaches both civil and criminal!

"His company has developed proprietary social media management tools and is regularly involved as a facilitator at roundtable discussions with C-level executives from a range of government bodies, charities and companies including Yahoo, eBay and Vodafone to name a few."

Does he seriously think people believe this stuff?  Firstly, any tools are based on PHP, which is open source, so how can his tools be proprietary?  Secondly, according to what we've seen they don't work, are full of bugs and the code is so badly written as to be almost useless!  As for this youth being taken seriously at a roundtable discussion with Yahoo, eBay and Vodafone - not a hope!!

This one we loved:

"......the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours."

There are only two things Calum Brannan is likely to have practised for this long.  The first is lying and he's incredibly good at that!  The second is auto-erotic stimulation.

"........combined with his successful track record......."

That's a bit of a classic - how many businesses has this boy had collapse around his ears?  3?  4? more?

The liquidation of a couple of them, Youmeo still isn't complete a year after the process started!

Well done Christer Holloman, you had us wetting ourselves with laughter at your article!!  Thank you for the best laugh we've had in ages, you muppet! 

That's your credibility dented for a while.

2009 - Long Year, Tall Tales, Downright Lies, Hairdressers and Social Helium

In Calum Brannan's own words:

• The long year – 2009
  Some 12 months after we launched Youmeo, American startup Friendfeed launched and was achieving massive growth doing what we were doing. The worlds a big place and we knew that we wern’t the only ones predicting this is how social networking would become. Friendfeed was setup by ex-Google employees, with it’s growth doing so well we had our innovation validated but we and we failed to raise next round investment we needed and failed to secure a robust revenue model. Our team and investors all walked away with our heads held high, we had pushed for inovation and many ways succeeded – but what an experience it had been.
• Present day - 2009 to now.
  Aged 20, I’m working on some very exciting ventures collaborating with some of the greatest minds in British business, some are already trading and generating healthy returns:
  
  • Appointment-Toolkit; this service provides text message reminders and marketing to doctors, hairdressers and dentists.
  • Social Helium: a social media consultancy business where current and previous clients include house-hold names, ‘AAA’ PLCs, charities and government organisations. We are social networking experts.
  • Spendego – a new type of advertising agency for todays social media world.
  My teams are regularly involved in roundtable discussions and consultancy with leading CTO’s, marketing directors, CLO’s and CEO’s from a range of companies including Simon & Schuster, Vodafone, Bebo, AGA, Lighterlife, Christian Vision, Yahoo and Glam Media to name but a few.

 What a load of garbage, Calum - The only time you're "regularly involved in roundtable discussions...." with AAA clients, CxOs, etc is between the time you fall asleep and the time you wake up.  You're dealing with a charity that look like they are about to get hauled hard for their (alleged) unethical conduct in conspiracy with you and James Leavesley, i.e. Christian Vision

Aga aren't a client of yours, don't seem to have any formal business arrangements with you and probably wouldn't be too impressed to find that you're naming them as such.

Vodafone - can't find anyone there who's even heard of you and they weren't too pleased to find you're naming them!

Lighterlife - fair enough, they seem to know you.

But the rest is just a badly punctuated, poorly spelt figment of your fertile imagination, it seems.  Who are these government organisations?

You were getting near the truth with "failed to secure a robust revenue model."

But then it all went wrong again with "Our team and investors all walked away with our heads held high, we had pushed for inovation and many ways succeeded – but what an experience it had been."

By the way, there are 2 "n"s in "innovation".

The truth is that Youmeo is still with the Liquidators and you're now on your 4th company in less than 12 months and you'd probably be flat broke by now if you hadn't (allegedly) lied and deceived your biggest (only?) client into coming with you for the rest of the Boost.tv project when you unceremoniously dumped Inormas after they had bailed you out from Red Brick Labs and youmeo!

It's just sad and pathetic to see you trying to perpetuate the lies - do you even know when you're lying anymore?

It's a pity (as a number of people have commented during this research) that, when you're young and described in such terms as "charismatic and persuasive", you can't find ways to use this for honest, beneficial purposes, instead of looking for a quick buck and acting like (what appears to be) little more than a charlatan and a con artist in order to achieve your ends, whatever the cost to others who choose to support you or buy in to your "bulls**t".

Just out of interest, do you actually know off the top of your head exactly how many individuals you've let down, either as investors or clients through failed businesses, failed promises or failed deliveries of product?  Do you even care?

Calum Brannan re-writes his CV

According to Calum Brannan's LinkedIn Profile, which he's obviously updated in the last few days (!!), he's never worked for Inormas!  Instead, he now seems to have used the time between the Spring and Autumn of 2009 working for SalonToolkit and Youmeo.


I'm sure that this will come as a huge shock to the people who've been paying his salary for the last 6+ months, as they don't seem to get any credit at all for the time and money they spent on him!


Moreover, Youmeo has been in the hands of the Receivers for the last few months, since his Red Brick labs/Youmeo venture, which he operated with James Leavesley, ran out of money and went down the pan!!  Which is why the original www.youmeo.com URL doesn't work!!


According to Calum's version of events, on LinkedIn, his employment history looks like this:

Experience

Social Media & Digital Consultant

CalumBrannan.com

Information Technology and Services industry

September 2009 – Present ( 4 months)

Helping businesses understand the everchanging world of social media and digital marketing.

Non-Exec

SalonToolkit Ltd

Internet industry

May 2009 – Present ( 8 months)

A new startup using SAAS to provide low cost, quality diary management and SMS reminder solutions.

Ambassador

Enterprise UK

Government Relations industry

September 2007 – Present (2 years 4 months)

We were founded in 2004 by the British Chamber of Commerce, the Confederation of British Industry, the Institute of Directors and the Federation of Small Businesses, funded mostly by what is now called the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills.

Founder/CTO

youmeo.com

Privately Held; Internet industry

April 2008 – August 2009 (1 year 5 months)

Youmeo.com was founded by young entrepreneur Calum Brannan in 2008, after being re-branded from PPLparty.com


It is a social networking aggregator. This technology allows its users to manage and update all their social networks from one location.


Youmeo is based from a converted Electric Factory in Coventry and it's team includes people from Bebo, Yahoo, BBC, KPMG, Media Corp and Trutap.

Calum has 6 recommendations (2 reports, 1 co-worker, 3 partners) including:

Founding Director

Redbrick Labs

Information Technology and Services industry

September 2008 – June 2009 ( 10 months)

Founding Director

PPLparty ltd

Internet industry

April 2005 – March 2008 (3 years)

PPLparty was created in 2005 for the clubbing community, it was sold into Youmeo.com in early 2008, where a new board and team transformed it into the cutting edge social media aggregator.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


So, there you have it - Calum Brannan has re-written his CV and ex-sponged Inormas from it.  This begs an interesting question - if Calum was working on the development of Salon Toolkit for this period of time, why was he asking for a salary from Inormas, when he wasn't actually doing the job they were paying him for........?


Perhaps more importantly, was he fulfilling his duties to clients like Christian Vision during this time?  And, even more importantly, what has happened to all the code written for Christian Vision, by his team, whilst he was off developing Salon Toolkit at Inormas's expense....?


We've also heard a rumour, unconfirmed as yet, that there may have been some extremely unsavoury and possibly illegal shenanigans going on between Bob Edmiston, the multi-millionaire chief of IM Group, Founder of Christian Vision and major benefactor to Grace Academies in Coventry and Solihull and the Calum Brannan / James Leavesley duo, now operating as CBJL Ltd.


You'll recall from the earlier blog, entitled

A bit more background about Calum Brannan

That the 4th Charitable objective of Christian Vision is, quote:

4. OTHER CHARITABLE PURPOSES BENEFICIAL TO THE COMMUNITY WITH PARTICULAR REFERENCE TO THE PROMOTION OF GOOD CITIZENSHIP AND MORAL VALUES WITH THE EMPHASIS ON HONESTY AND INTEGRITY IN EVERY DAY LIFE AND IN BUSINESS.

Now, we're pretty certain from the information shown to us, that this simply isn't the case where Robert Norman Edmiston's conduct in this matter is concerned...... and, if it's true, there are going to be some pretty heated exchanges on the subject when the Trustees of CV find out about this!!

Not to mention the few words that "Benevolent Uncle Bob" is going to want to have with James and Calum about the mess they've made of things!!

On the other hand, where Calum's concerned, it's not even clear that he knows when he's lying and when he's telling the truth, as we have reports of him doing it without even taking a breath!

Watch this space - the juicy stuff is coming!!