Employability Skills, Entrepreneurial Mindset and Team Work
When you have a business idea, startup or small medium enterprise (SME), there is a never-ending list of tasks to do, and you could always get more help. And, if you are a job seeker, participant, or student, it can be difficult to get real world experience, build your employability skills, and networks. So how could you meet all these outcomes?
Consider an approach that has proven results in a very short space of time that is an Innovation Growth Hack, with elements similar to Startup Weekend, GovHack and 3 Day Startups.
What is Growth Hacking?
Growth hacking is a process of rapid experimentation across marketing channels and product development to identify the most effective, efficient ways to grow a business.
Growth hacking refers to a set of both conventional and unconventional marketing experiments that lead to growth of a business.
A growth hack is designed to achieve practical outcomes in a short space of time, including increasing social media followers and engagement, updating your online presence and digital footprint, gaining customers and sales. And if you are at business idea stage the focus is on validating that your idea could be a viable and sustainable business.
Work with experienced business and startup coaches who have expertise across all areas to get things done - bring along your device so you can work on tasks and validation, then and there, with a team of people behind you.
Who are the participants? Self-employed people and small business owners, including people who have business ideas, pitch their business for potential team members (the audience) to work with them. The audience can include job seekers and Workforce Australia participants, students (high school, VET and Higher Education), business, industry and regional mentors, speakers, panels members (for the final pitch), and broader entrepreneurial ecosystem members, and supporters.
What is the duration? Run over 2 weeks (2-3 days in total, 20 hours plus similar hours of participants time outside of the facilitated sessions) with an intensive face to face 2 days initially, then another final face to face or online day, plus an evening pitch night/showcase at a local venue. Teams will work online and can get together at other times over the 2 weeks if needed.
What resources are needed? A venue with WI-FI including a large space and smaller spaces, catering and audio-visual equipment - transport and childcare are considerations too.
What are the learning outcomes?
Participants:
- gain a better understanding of what’s involved in starting a business
- generate and validate business ideas
- make an informed decision about whether self-employment is right for you
- experience the benefits and drawbacks of self-employment
- become familiar with the programs and services in your small business ecosystem that can help you to start and run a business
- experience some of the challenges that you may face while starting and running a business and the strategies to work through those challenges
- how to generate and validate business ideas, new experiences, products and services, with ideas identified as either potentially viable or not viable, and how the idea can be adjusted to be viable
- be capable of identifying which business structure would be most appropriate for their business idea
- have a general awareness of the key legal, insurance and tax requirements for business owners, and
- understand the importance of book-keeping for businesses
- be able to explain why a digital presence is important for businesses
- have identified what an appropriate digital footprint for your business idea looks like
- know where you can seek support developing an appropriate web presence for their business idea
- understand how and why you should develop appropriate branding for your business idea
- be capable of identifying the value proposition of your business idea
- have selected an appropriate marketing mix for your chosen business idea/business
- develop employability skills and new connections
How does it work? From an initial pitch session (60 seconds), followed by the ‘hustle’, participants from the audience chose a team that they want to work on. Teams meet to hone those things that are on the to do list, prioritising with the following checklist to identify practical tasks that need to be done.
Who do you contact for further information
Please contact Wendy Perry via wendy@workforceblueprint.com.au 0416 150 491, 08 387 9800, and http://www.workforceblueprint.com.au, thank you.