Business Technical Assistance Program

This intensive 6-week program brings you together with other aspiring entrepreneurs to validate your business ideas and work as a group to make them a reality. It’s about active, dynamic conversations to promote experiential learning, peer collaboration, and critical thinking. The discussions will push you to examine your business concepts in a safe environment. Support and guidance are provided by entrepreneurial advisors with over 20 years of experience starting, scaling, and empowering businesses.

In this program, you will:

• Learn to understand and communicate your business’s value proposition
• Refine your business roadmap and ideas
• Develop a dynamic business model
• Cultivate the mindset needed to plan and succeed
• Actively conduct customer discovery and validation
• Learn tactics to manage finances for profitability

The program includes: fifteen hours of interactive curriculum delivery; three one-hour, one-on-one advisory sessions; and a three-month subscription to Live Plan, an online business plan platform where the participants will develop a fundable and actionable business plan.

This program is focused on your needs as an existing business. If you are trying to scale your business, or you are facing a bottleneck in your growth, the Accelerator program can help you move your business toward its growth goals. In six intensive sessions that are tailored to small and mid-size enterprises, you will work with entrepreneurial advisors, who have extensive expertise in scaling and growing businesses.

In this program, you will:

• Combine design thinking with specific business acceleration principles, tools, and methodologies
• Design and plan your organizational foundation and business acceleration model
• Challenge growth assumptions and hypotheses
• Benefit from peer-to-peer participation and professional advisory sessions
• Develop your growth strategy and business model
• Balance your resources with the processes necessary to establish an active organizational structure
• Learn how to ensure an exceptional customer experience

The program includes fifteen hours of interactive curriculum delivery during the six sessions and three one-hour, one-on-one advisory sessions.

Sometimes a business problem is more suitably dealt with one-on-one with a subject matter expert. The Advisory service allows an entrepreneur to access one of the subject matter experts at CEED to assist them in working through a business issue with a specific or limited scope. Advisory assistance is available in the following areas:

• Finance and accounting
• Sales and marketing
• Social media
• Business plan development
• Export development and international business
• Innovation
• Strategic and operations management