Week 6! LeapIN Online is flying by! We are having such a great time with all of our businesses in the cohort and our amazing presenters! This week we built on some of our sales and community building knowledge from last week and moved into focusing on our financials!
Day 20: Today we started our day with a visit from Michele Beaudoin, Vice-President, Student Services at Fanshawe College! Michele joins us every year to learn a bit more about our cohort and provide support where she can! It is always a good day when she visits us! For our workshop, we were joined by Scott Currie, a sales expert with experience in large corporations and with his start-up. Scott took us through the sales process and some sales negotiation strategies! This was great because we are starting to understand our business and our customer more and more so it was great to practise some selling!
Day 21: The focus today was on creating and participating in community! Our very own Andres Garzon lead us through our day; we started by sharing what we admire about each other and then had some time to discuss our community and culture and how those things impact our business. Andres organized a wonderful panel to join us! Robin from Antler River Press, Alayna from Softflirt, and Savanah from Downtown London all joined us to discuss their work in the community and share how we can get involved. LeapIN is its own small community and it was a pleasure to learn how we could expand it as we grow! That afternoon we were joined by some of our Fanshawe College staff and friends to practice our pitches! Alex, Annette, Kevin, and Rebecca all joined us for some intensive pitch work as we get ready for our Demo Day! Thank you all so much for your help!
Day 22: On day 22 we focused on taxes! Taylor from the Cooperators joined us for our morning session. Taylor took us through HST, reporting our income, and write-offs! We also were able to ask him some great questions about our specific tax needs. After focusing on taxes, we took a step into our bookkeeping and we were joined by Kim from the Lawrence Kinlin School of Business! Kim showed us some great software and taught us about tracking our expenses and payments! A big thanks to our financial professionals who joined us today!
Day 23: Thursday is Brag and Drag as Skill Share day! Christine from Qualia Hub was up for Skill Share and Lisa Kurlap from FML Adventures joined us for our Brag and Drag! After our awesome morning, we continued our financial training with John and Phil from the Small Business Centre! John and Phil taught us all about the various financial statements we need to be preparing and shared with us some information about financing and accounting in general! Off we went for the weekend to get our books in order and to prepare for the last week of the program!
Thank you so much to our financial, sales, and community presenter who joined us this week! All of these things are super important to our businesses and will help them grow as we grow! Next week is our last week together and already we are getting sad to know the program is ending but excited to implement all the knowledge we have gained!
Curious about our cohort and their businesses, check them out below!
Tyler from Celebration
Sharlene from Real Model Mom
Jared from JR Welding
Swaraj from Taxably
Christine from Qualia Hub
Kelly from Studio KVR
Aaron and Omar from Nitro Route
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!**
If you want to start a business but don't know where to start, book a virtual appointment! Or, feel free to send us your questions and comments at leapjunction@fanshawec.ca!