The idea for Break The Ice occured to me during covid when I needed to create a new way to keep in touch with potential clients for our photography business, Pixel Roses. Increasingly the clients we were attracting were the owners of small businesses looking for images for personal branding, websites, LinkedIn, speaking engagements and so on.

As a business-led platform LinkedIn was likely to be the best place to find my target audience. However, I had only 346 followers... not a massive crowd, let's face it! Although I'd had a profile on LinkedIn for a few years, it was always more about finding a job, and so I hadn't really done anything to build a presence; particularly as my job opportunities had always come through people I already new.

Long story short, I started Break the Ice with idea of growing my number of LinkedIn connections with the idea that one day it would something I would try and monetise. In the last four years (despite LinkedIn introducing limits for the number of connection requests) I have still managed to grow my connections with my target audience of small business owners to over 20,000.

Break the Ice is an online networking event for small business owners, solopreneurs, and coaches based in Dubai. We know that traditional networking can feel forced and formal. So we do things differently by not only giving everyone the chance to meet and greet everyone, but also to conduct mini-interviews during the session. Asking good questions makes the session both informative and at the same time less formal, which in turn helps people to relax.

✅ Meet like-minded business owners

✅ Share what you do (without the sales pitch)

✅ Build genuine connections

✅ Find collaboration opportunities

✅Small, friendly, and focused on conversations that matter.