Tag Archive: education

Social Enterprise Academy Day 3

At the beginning of Day 3, Randy White shared about soul care for the social entrepreneur.

After getting an update from each entrepreneur, Andrew Shinn taught business modeling – how to plan and project for success. Participants learned about pricing, cost of goods sold, monthly fixed costs, break-even point, and how to project forward-looking income statements. Andrew shared the example of the Coolest, and how to properly model and plan your business.

For today’s field trip, we visited Tree of Life Cafe. Steve and Carolyn Ocheltree shared their entrepreneurial journey with us and fed us some delicious tomato basil soup and bierocks. Steve also mentioned Quickbooks Online as a great tool for startup accounting.

Social Enterprise Academy participants share lunch at the Tree of Life Café.

Randy White interviews Steve Ocheltree at Tree of Life Café.

Steve Ocheltree speaks at Tree of Life Café.

After lunch, Alex Hussain-Leon shared some excellent tech and productivity tips. Some of the tools he shared include:

  • Google Drive (and all the associated tools)
  • Asana – A project management tool
  • Hubspot – A great free Hubspot
  • Canva – A great free graphic design tool

Jeremy Hofer from Access Plus Capital shares about startup funding for social entrepreneurs.

Jeremy Hofer from Access Plus Capital explained sources of startup funding for entrepreneurs, shared some financial management tools, and made social entrepreneurs ready to interact with lenders (if that becomes necessary).

Jeremy shared this business startup costs worksheet

And this cashflow projections template

And this financial projections spreadsheet

Some of the participants in the Social Enterprise Academy include:

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Social Enterprise Academy – Resources from Day 2

For day 2, we heard from Brice Yocum, Rex B, and Miles Sebesta.

Brice Yocum talks with social entrepreneurs about iterating on ideas

Stuff Brice shared:

  • Change by Design by Tim Brown
  • Design thinking: Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test
  • Fairness is overrated. Don’t serve everyone: serve one group with excellence.
  • You can’t swing at every pitch!

Rex B drops some sales knowledge.

Stuff Rex shared:

  • You are all salespeople!
  • Nobody cares about your product. They care about themselves and their problems.
  • Create templates for
    • Cold-calling
    • E-mail
    • Social media selling
  • The Top Inbox: a Gmail add-on that supercharges e-mail
  • Calendly: tool for scheduling meetings
  • Concord: platform for managing and signing contracts
  • Square: Free-to-start, easy credit-card-processing
  • Workable: platform for recruiting and hiring
  • Hubspot: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and InBound Marketing
  • Mailchimp: Free e-mail marketing
  • Rex’s book, Outbound Sales, No Fluff

Miles Sebesta talk marketing hypothesis and testing.

Stuff Miles shared:

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Businesses my students are launching

I’m privileged to teach business and entrepreneurship at Fresno Pacific University. This semester, my students in Seminar in Strategic Management are launching businesses. Here are a few of the projects they’re working on:

For Freedom Flags

These patriotic decor pieces are great gifts for veterans, police officers, firefighter, and other heroes and patriots.

Altered Marketing

This dynamic duo is offering social media marketing consulting for small businesses. Any business that needs more traffic or wants to sell more should look them up!

Wisdom Watchers

These caring helpers take care of the daily household needs of older people. They help people living on their own to stay independent for longer, and they provide peace of mind for anyone responsible for an older relative.

Cell Now

These recycle-preneurs take used or broken electronics and give them a new life before selling them overseas to people who don’t have access to the latest gadgets.

T.H.E. Detail Kings

These hard-working guys help to protect the investment you’ve made in your car. They make your used car feel like a new car for only a fraction of the price!

The.Design.Dude

These guys make unique stickers, delivered with a unique experience!

Renegade Shirts

These guys deliver custom, classy t-shirts for military members and firearms enthusiasts. They also offer military unit t-shirts at a good price and right when they’re needed.

String It On

This team makes custom string art wall art (backed by good stories) for home stagers and moms with kids.

Which project is your favorite? Which one(s) do you want more information about?

Reading for entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are curious people. They’re driven to create, and part of that process involves learning from others. The most successful entrepreneurs read – a lot.

Much of my business education comes from the books I’ve read. As I was mentoring a young entrepreneur recently, he asked me for a list of books to read. Once I started the list, I realized it’s rather long. I’ve decided to share that list here with you, along with reviews to help you get the most out of these books (and prioritize them along with the rest of your work).

Books on a curving library wall

Image by Marcus Hannson, used in accordance with Creative Commons license.

What e-ship books do you think are must-reads?

Stay tuned for future posts on Reading for Entrepreneurs!

How to get started with hardly any money

This is a slideshow from a talk I gave at #SOENT17.

It goes through some bootstrapping techniques used when starting a new business. This talk concentrated on Social Enterprises and the unique advantages and challenges of such. “What is a social enterprise?” you may ask. That’s a great question and a subject for another day’s blog post.

For now, please let me know if there are areas of the presentation that you’d like to see explained in detail. Leave a comment below if you’d like to talk about this further.

The Slides


The Presentation

 

Company Visits: Manufacturing

I have the opportunity to take students inside four different manufacturing companies this week. These companies are really opening up to talk about sales, production, accounting, production scheduling, labor and personnel, and other useful business topics. Below are the first two company visits, posted over at a web site I created for the project, ePathway Academy. Follow along and enjoy!

Cru Winery

MEC Aerial Work Platforms