Transform SY BizJam - can 2-day workshops deliver outstanding impact to founders?
All BizJam pitch competition participants, judges and Transform SY team
Entrepreneurial Spark’s accelerator programmes are 4 to 6 months long for a reason - change, both personal and in business context, happens slowly and is a result of continuous work that spans beyond weeks. Plus, being a mindset-led accelerator, some founders find it difficult to buy into our method of acceleration at first, and cracking through takes some time.
That is why we’ve stayed away from 2-day boot camps and workshops - nothing against the format, but we don’t find it relevant for our type of support.
However, at Entrepreneurial Spark we do what we preach - and one of those things is to always listen to your customer. In our one year in South Yorkshire with Transform SY, we’ve connected with hundreds of entrepreneurs and have used the opportunity to ask them all sorts of questions so we can keep improving our support offering for them. A notable feedback we received from some is that ‘6 months is too long for a support programme’ - and ‘even though our approach sounds interesting’, commitment towards such long period is an obstacle for many.
So we listened and sat down with a mission - to consolidate 6 months of entrepreneurial and mindset coaching, teaching and mentoring, into 2 days of 8 hours each. In itself it sounded crazy - so we called it Transform SY BizJam!
BizJam shares similarities with an event I have a history with - Startup Weekend. Startup Weekend was created about 15 years ago and is what it sounds like - an event for people to build startups in a weekend. Jam-packed action in a reduced amount of time is an environment I thrive in and to be doing something similar as part of the Transform SY journey was exciting. We promised the founder who join us 3 clear outcomes:
90-day plan for customer discovery and development, value proposition and how to take smarter risks (using the lean methodology)
Pitching masterclass - learn how to pitch like the best
Meet your business ecosystem - meet with public and private stakeholders from the region and learn about the opportunities for your business
8 entrepreneurs joined us for the ride and on November 22nd, not even a week after we completed Cohort 2, Transform SY BizJam commenced!
First very noticeable thing about the programme was once again the diversity of participants - both gender, race and nationality, but also occupation, industry, place of living. We had a female founder from Doncaster looking to publish books for kids to improve their emotional intelligence, a father and son building a SaaS product for finance professionals, a teenager reimagining the pavement blocks and what they are made of and an experienced entrepreneur coming back to a product that was too early for market few years back. It was a room full of interesting ideas, abundance of knowledge and a lot of eagerness to build something great.
Throughout Day 1, we covered ‘Mindsets & Behaviours’, ‘Customer Discovery, ‘Value Proposition’ and ‘Pitching masterclass’ - all of that in less than 8 hours! Every session consisted of few theory-based learning points, engaged discussion between us and the entrepreneurs and then action-led exercise to allow our entrepreneurs to put their newly-learnt theory to practice.
3 takeaways from Day 1:
Discussion, not lecture - it’s fascinating how much better workshops are when we intentionally guide and seek more discussion rather than keeping them as a one-sided lecture. Entrepreneurs learn from us but also one another, stay engaged, the energy stays high and we get to the action-led exercises faster.
Find your problem, customers will follow - the best thing about business support are breakthroughs. Like when entrepreneurs learn they could do something in a better way. At BizJam, I had a founder tell me ‘I realise I’ve been thinking about startups wrong the whole time. It’s scary to think that I might be building a solution which people don’t want right now… But it’s exciting to know this process and that I’ll be able to test any idea I have from now on with it!’.
The right environment can provoke the right type of action - we had founders whose energy from the beginning to the end of the day was completely shifted. So if you feel stuck or need a recharge, absolutely put yourself around other entrepreneurs or in a situation where you will be demanded to act - it will help.
Day 2 of BizJam was even more packed and busy - we started early with ‘Lean Startup’ workshop which was followed by a visit from Nicola Bladen, business advisor from South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority. SYMCA are one of our partners that we deliver Transform SY with so Nicola came to show the founders what support the authority offers for free to regional businesses. She was followed by Kim Holland later in the day, who spoke about TEAM SY - the overarching project we are part of, as they both represented our efforts to inform the BizJam participants about all opportunities for support in the region.
Day 2 also had a 90-day planning session and ‘mastermind groups’ activity in which the founders got to know and help each other better, and we kept the best for last - a pitching competition!
With a £1000 award provided by the family investment firm Mandashi, part of which is Danny Evans who was on Transform SY’s 2nd cohort with AppMesters, the BizJam pitching competition turned into the main event of the 2-day business sprint. The rules were simple - every founder gets a minute to pitch their business according to the advice, guidelines and tips given in the ‘Pitching masterclass’ session the day before. Then, the judging panel gets to ask them a question each (3 judges) and the winner goes home with a thousand quid.
Having a competition at the end of BizJam worked great - even at the ‘low energy points’ of the sprint, we knew that there is a final destination everyone is looking towards and it made the end of the second day more dynamic and energetic. We had 3 judges join us - Danny and his father Andy Evans from Mandashi, and Steve Lyon from UKSE - another Transform SY partner that invests strategically in B2B companies. Here are the 6 founders that pitched and their companies (2 participants were unable to join us for day 2):
Thomas Valentine from Evo Block - Thomas, at just 19, built a machine in his garage where he makes pavement blocks from recycled plastic and sand, as he cuts cement from the equation making the product more sustainable, eco-friendly and carbon-efficient! He’s just sorting out the last details around having his material tested at Sheffield Hallam University’s labs to prove it’s up to the industry standard.
Hannah Weinhold and Aaron Jack from SlickDuck - Hannah has a digital marketing agency and updating her customers on projects day-to-day is a nightmarish soup of WhatsApp messages, emails, cloud storages and whatnot. Aaron is a developer and created SlickDuck to help Hannah manage her clients from one place - and she loved it so much that now they are working together on scaling the product!
Caroline Dawson from The Fredbert Fuzz Project - have you heard of Fredbert? Caroline created the sockmonkey about a decade ago, and it was quite a hit in Doncaster. Having left it on the side for a bit, Caroline recently rediscovered Fredbert as she’s now a mother and decided to use the monkey as a mascot in her effort to bring emotional intelligence to kids. She plans to do that by publishing books (one is already out) and educational materials in different formats.
Wayne Smallman from Undercloud - Wayne has helped businesses with their digital transformation for the last decade, and in the meantime came up with the idea for Undercloud - a note-taking platform that allows him to create linking chains, a function particularly helpful for journalists and people who want a better-organised online working space.
Amal Hassan from Lang Coach - Amal started teaching English with increased focus on soft skills, cultural differences and business etiquette, and quickly started gaining more and more customers. When she had to reach out to another teacher to take some of her students, she realised there’s a business waiting to be scaled. Amal recently relocated to Sheffield and BizJam was her first involvement with the local ecosystem.
Philip Thompson from Quantum Software - accompanied by his son Chris who’s currently taking over the business, Phil presented to us his SaaS for financial advisors that holds up to all new legislative requirements. Phil built the MVP and already has a customer on board, with BizJam being an opportunity for the father-son duo to develop their network and ways to engage with more customers.
The founders had a night to prepare their pitches and they smashed it. The winner was Thomas Valentine from Evo Block, as the judges found his delivery the best out of the contestants, but it was really close as every participant brought something unique. Thomas went home with the award, but we hope the money are the least of what he’s taking away from Transform SY BizJam.
Thomas Valentine (holding the certificate) - winner of Transform SY BizJam Pitching Competition, alongside our judging panel (from left to right - Steve Lyon, Danny Evans, Andy Evans)
Takeaways from Day 2:
1 minute is enough for a pitch! - even though we got some worried faces when announced that pitches will be only a minute, the entrepreneurs still managed to get it done and were able to confidently convey all the important information around their businesses in 60 seconds. Some of them even had time to spare!
Terminology can be confusing - although I’m a fan of Eric Ries and the lean methodology in general, the terminology and language used can sometimes be wildly confusing and make things seem much more complicated than they are. I am always fascinated to see how easy founders come up with experiments to run when the methodology is explained to them in simple terms.
Planning’s great, what’s next? - one of the negatives of a 2-day business sprint is that it’s… 2 days! All founders made such exciting plans to execute in the next 90 days that I felt like we could have had a structure/system in place for how to keep in touch with the founders post-BizJam too. I’ve been doing it informally, but having a process would have been a nice extra (and a got learning outcome for next time!).
All in all, BizJam was a successful experiment. The value we are able to deliver to entrepreneurs in 2 days is completely different to the one delivered in a long-form programme, but the impact can still be substantial. BizJam 2 in 2023? Who knows…