Workshops
The Center for Entrepreneurship Workshop series serves as an accelerator for your startup business. The first three workshops (mindset, revere engineering, and diligence) are recommended before you start the ideation and product build process. It's best to access the latter five workshops after you have a minimally viable product. In total, these workshops will guide you as you develop entrepreneurial inspiration, generate revenue, built talent, and raise capital. Note that the Entrepreneurial Speaker Series will feature noteworthy founders and funders to complement workshop learnings and activities.
Entrepreneurial Mindset
What does it take to be an entrepreneur? What are the type of entrepreneurial roles and what roles are needed on successful entrepreneurial teams? What are your strengths and weaknesses and how do you need to compose your founding team based on your these? What is your why? How should this inform the type of entrepreneurial endeavors you pursue? This workshop will lead you through evidence and exercises to prepare you for entrepreneurship.
Fall Offerings:
Reverse Engineering the Startup
In this workshop, we start with the assumptions you have about the funds you need to raise to get your business going. From there we first back into the exit you will need to provide your venture capital partner before then calculating the EBITDA you need to generate in various periods to reach that valuation. With these EBITDA figures and assumptions about profit margins, we can back into the revenues your business needs to create. From there we can make assumptions about marketshare capture and deduce the market size needed to power your business. This bottom up process helps you understand how you need to think about your business as you go about building it from the top down.
Fall Offerings:
- Wednesday, Sep 24th from 5:00 to 7:00 pm in Management Hall 209: RSVP here
- Saturday, Sep 27th from 10:00 am to Noon in Management Hall 209: RSVP here
Diligencing Startup Ideas
If you were going to buy a business, it's rare that you would do diligence on just one. In the same manner, we highly encourage our founders to do diligence on multiple ideas. Entrepreneurism is hard and there is real economic cost to building a startup. You owe it to yourself to pursue the best idea for you. This workshop will lead you through the Vanderbilt Diligence Workbook and market research methods you can use to determine what startup idea provides you the greatest opportunity of success.
Fall Offerings:
- Wednesday, Oct 8th from 5:00 to 7:00 pm in Management Hall 209: RSVP here
- Saturday, Oct 11th from 10:00 am to Noon in Management Hall 209: RSVP here
Business Model Workshop
This workshop covers the various types of business models you can think about leveraging for your startup. Which model helps maximize value capture? Which one helps minimize adoption friction? Which one promotes customer retention?
Fall Offerings:
- Wednesday, Oct 22nd from 5:00 to 7:00 pm in Management Hall 209: RSVP here
- Saturday, Oct 25th from 10:00 am to Noon in Management Hall 209: RSVP here
Generating Leads
In this workshop, we use the Storybrand framework to map the Hero's Journey for your product. We use this branding and seminars on lead generation strategies to build out your marketing stack as you move toward commercial readiness. Incorporates exercises for segmenting your market, determining targets, creating website landing pages with calls to actions, creating social and digital campaigns, and setting up a CRM.
Fall Offerings:
- Wednesday, Oct 29th from 5:00 to 7:30 pm in Management Hall 209: RSVP here
- Saturday, Nov 1st from 9:30 am to Noon in Management Hall 209: RSVP here
Nurturing, Closing & Retaining Leads
What journey does your customer take from their first interaction with you until they sign on the dotted line. What is the sales and marketing automation mix to ensure potential customers are not lost to follow-up? How do you score your leads to understand the right strategies to take at the right time? How can you leverage the COMPLY framework to ensure you successfully onboard and retain customers? This workshop is about planning and building your growth engine.
Fall Offerings:
- Wednesday, Nov 12th from 5:00 to 7:30 pm in Management Hall 209: RSVP here
- Saturday, Nov 15th from 9:30 am to Noon in Management Hall 209: RSVP here
Entrepreneurial Leadership
This workshop focuses on two things: how you build human capital within your startup and how you lead your talent to gain traction. For the former, we use the Vanderbilt Strategic Alignment of Human Capital framework to identify the culture and values that will enable your organization to win. From there, we map out the recruiting, compensation, onboarding, and retention practices that will align your human capital with winning culture and values. For the latter, we teach principles of the Entrepreneurial Operating System to help you gain traction. This workshop also provides a pathway to evolve your leadership over time as the leadership needs of the organization change.
Fall Offerings:
- Wednesday, Dec 3rd from 5:00 to 7:30 pm in Management Hall 209: RSVP here
- Saturday, Dec 6th from 9:30 am to Noon in Management Hall 209: RSVP here
Evidence-based Fundraising
This workshop creates a strategic roadmap for your startup to gain capital for growth. We will calculate uses of funds and a number to raise. Harking back to the Reverse Engineering workshop, we will then identify the most appropriate sources of capital for your business and strategize a month by month process to generate and close investors.
This workshop is by invitation. Completion of all courses in the accelerator workshop series is required before gaining access.