Jumpstart Your Business Series
Six workshops in six weeks offer skills and techniques essential for a successful business start-up, or to strengthen an existing business. Aspiring entrepreneurs enroll in the series to learn how to take an idea and transform it into a business. Existing businesses profit, too, by selecting individual workshops to fine-tune a business.
JumpStart Your Business offers practical information on starting and growing a business, including the nuts and bolts of developing a business idea, coursework to guide the creation of a business plan, and group interaction and networking.
1. IDENTIFYING THE MARKET VIABILITY OF YOUR BUSINESS CONCEPT
How do you know if you have a viable idea that will thrive in the marketplace? How do you identify your business model and determine your target market? How do you do your own market research? What You Will Learn:
- If there really is a market for your business idea, i.e., is it feasible and can it be profitable?
- If you can achieve your personal as well as business goal
- The key to profitable market research
- How to conduct your own research
- How to evaluate other business ideas
- How to better define a target market
- What you should know prior to starting or expanding your business
2. REACHING YOUR MARKET STRATEGICALLY
Once you know who your target market and ideal clients are, you need to figure out how to reach them. You will learn how to:
- Distinguish between selling and marketing
- Identify features and benefits of your products/services
- Develop at least three strategies for marketing
- Identify key forms of media that will help you market your business
- Identify elements of effective website design
- Understand the benefits and cautions of using social media for marketing
- Outline your plan of action and budget to build the marketing part of your business plan.
3. CLOSING YOUR DEALS: PLANNING SALES STRATEGIES
Once you have targeted your Market and figured out how to reach them, you need to plan your sales strategies and conversations. you will be able to:
- Understand and use sales process terms.
- Understand the sales process and sales funnel
- Articulate solutions using your product/service
- Differentiate yourself and establish credibility
- Understand how to qualify leads and build credibility through effective questions
- Prepare for calls, execute a sales call and follow-up
- Ask high value questions in each part of the process.
- Start tracking and analyzing leads
- Outline your plan of action to build a sales strategy
4. FINANCIAL SMARTS FOR BUSINESS STARTS
Every business owner must be able to analyze costs and revenues for their business. In this workshop, You will be learn to
- Understand the importance of decreasing risk by employing monthly record keeping
- Understand the critical role of the tax professional/accountant
- Understand the difference between cash flow and profit and loss
- Apply five types of financial statements and know the purpose of each statement: -- Budget -- Cash flow Statement -- Profit and Loss Sheet -- Balance Sheet -- Break Even Analysis
- Understand how financial analysis (record keeping) and marketing work together
5. FINANCIAL ANALYSIS: BUILDING YOUR FINANCIAL MUSCLE WITH THE EXPERT
This is a continuation session from Jumpstart Module 4, which is a prerequisite for this workshop. Here, you will meet with WBDC financial specialist to dig deeper into understanding the financial pieces of running your business. You will learn how to:
- Determine cash flow projections
- Create revenue assumptions and sales projections prior to listing business expenses
- Develop sales projections utilizing a variety of strategies
- Utilize financial ratios
- Learn what is essential in managing business banking relationships
6. GUIDING YOUR SUCCESS THROUGH BUILDING A BUSINESS PLAN
The Business Plan Workshop is designed to be taken by both new business owners and owners of emerging or established businesses. You will write a draft of your executive summary as an outline for creating your full business plan and your planning process. You will learn all the parts of an effective plan and why it’s important that you get it on paper
