After an amazing first week, it was hard to think of how we were going to top it! Our crew came together and we had a wonderful second week together. This week we focused on our customers and building businesses that serve our customers first and foremost.
Day 5: We started the day by going through our value propositions, it's great to see how they are already changing as everyone starts to consider new aspects of their business. We've started calling this session Value Proposition Roulette because we call on our cohort to deliver and offer feedback at random. Then we welcomed our friend Paula from the Fanshawe College Library to review some helpful tools for Market Research! It's truly amazing the resources our Library makes available for our students. After a short break, Coach Dave, lead us through some more exercises to help us understand our market research! We were introduced to PESTLE Analysis and we all had to complete this for our business. We ended our day by participating in an online course through MaRS.
Day 6: On our sixth day we focused on the Voice of our customer. It was an exciting morning because we were able to welcome Akash from Taxably to join us for the day! We spent the majority of the morning with Kim Medynsky who helped us understand more about our customers and taught us how to ask better questions of our customers to gain honest feedback on our businesses.
Day 7: Today we were excited to be joined by Michael Armstrong of Brock University. Michael taught us about the Kano Model, the Quality Function Deployment Model, and the Gaps Model which helped us understand how to categorize a customer's expectations, translate those expectations into products, and get the implementations of those products right! Finally, after almost 2-weeks of playing with our Value Propositions, Coach Dave led us through a formal value proposition workshop. It gave us lots to think about as we considered why our customers would choose us over the competition!
Day 8: Thursday mornings are special to us because of our Brag and Drag and Skill Share sessions! Today our past LeapIN participant, Shannon from Diamond Studios joined us for Brag and Drag and told us about the things she is working on these days. Then we had a Skill Share from Swaraj and Kristen! Swaraj taught us about business taxes and real estate investing and Kirsten helped us with some healthy meal prep to keep our bellies full as we filled our minds. We started our workshops today with our friend Rhonda Payne from the Lawrence Kinlin School of Business. She is AMAZING and helped each of us review our businesses to find opportunities to improve our brand position! Later, we had Ubong and James from Tech Alliance join us for a presentation on B2C sales and to share some of the services Tech Alliance provides to our community. Mind and hearts full, we wrapped up our week and went off to work on our homework!
Curious about our cohort and their businesses, check them out below!
Tyler from Celebration
Sharelen from Real Model Mom
Jared from JR Welding
Swaraj from Taxably
Christine from Qualia Hub
Kelly from Studio KVR
Aaron and Omar from Fastrack
Jesse from The Hot Sauce Co.
Maxwell from Face Two Face Vintage
Chintan from Greenovation - Eco Dinnerware
Kristen from Soul Runners
Chris from Bernese
**You can find more about them on our social media @leapjunction!**
Do you think LeapIN might be for you? Applications for the program open in January; in the meantime, why not Book a virtual appointment! Feel free to send us your questions and comments at leapjunction@fanshawec.ca.