Across the city, social entrepreneurs and mission-driven organizations are reshaping how change happens. They are starting new organizations, new companies, and new initiatives to follow their passion for a game changing idea. Many of their founders and teams rely on outside support to grow their idea into a self-sustaining business or impactful organization. They face crucial decisions about legal structures, accounting, operations, team development, marketing, capital, and strategy.
In 2018, Impact Hub and Twilight Quest founded the Strategy School for Service Providers with a strong belief that Social entrepreneurs need a strong ecosystem behind them to make real and lasting change.
The better support service providers can offer to these growing companies and organizations, the better chances emerging social entrepreneurs and mission-driven organizations will have to launch, scale, and thrive.
The six-month program accelerates mission-driven organizations and businesses by developing entrepreneurs and their initiatives simultaneously. Its curriculum integrates visual planning tools to create strategies for business development, marketing, operations, and self-care. Monthly peer circles and weekly group coaching calls supplement online learning modules and enable peer-to-peer exchange and accountability. The inaugural cohort focuses on specialists who support social entrepreneurs. They offer grant writing, marketing, facilitation, legal council, accounting, retail platforms, and storefronts to entrepreneurs across the city. Strategy School enables them to concentrate on their own business strategies to improve service offerings. Graduates of the program will provide a bench of specialists for Impact Hub members and other partners in in the entrepreneurial ecosystem.
>> Hear what inaugural cohort member, Aneka Winstead of WATT Business Solutions had to say:
“Strategy School has been great! From the very start, the program has made it clear that self care is a huge key to success when it comes to business. If you don’t take care of yourself you can’t take care of anything else. This is important to me as I am a mother of 3 boys and a wife. Running my business as a sole owner and maintaining a household is difficult but with Strategy School and Q, they help you to learn to balance it all. Marketing has never been my strong suit nor has strategy but with the modules and the Q sheets that the school has created, it has become an easy and worthwhile task. It has helped me to make sense of it all and put an actual picture to my vision. The marketing module is awesome for whether you are advanced or a novice at marketing. As a whole, Strategy School has been priceless. I’ve attended other business cohorts but none as worthwhile as this.”
Aneka began the program with a growing business that was completely bogging her down. She found the beginning of Strategy School, completely focused on teaching strategies for self-care and productivity, to be an extremely significant part of her progress in the program. She was able to employ these strategies immediately, which resulted in an immediate increase in capacity.
In addition to beginning to use self care as a business strategy, Aneka also used the knowledge learned in Strategy School to gain clarity around her revenue streams, get a clearer vision of her target persona to generate more qualified leads through content creation, as well as used her newly acquired marketing knowledge to streamline her process of outsourcing and leveraging resources effectively.
