My week with Marilyn... Not quite, but just as mesmerising and inspiring!
From an initial 215 Scottish based entrepreneurs who have aspirations of going global, I was one of the lucky 70 chosen, after interviews in Glasgow in July, to attend the 5 day Can Do Scale residential course at Stirling University from 3rd-7th August 2015, organised in association with the Scottish Government.
As part the Elevator Accelerator 20-week programme in Aberdeen, we have been studying the books of world renowned entrepreneurial academics and authors Bill Aulet of M.I.T (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) who wrote “Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup" and Noam Wasserman of Harvard who wrote "The Founder's Dimennas: Anticipating and Avoiding the Pitfalls That Can Sink a Startup", so the chance to attend a course at which these two world renowned academics were speaking and teaching at, was too good to miss.
If you want to be world class, learn world class, right? Well that’s exactly what it was, world class learning and also world class networking too.
When else would you get the chance to spend this amount of time with 70 other highly motivated entrepreneurs talking business, problems and dreams? Breakfast, lunch and dinner were all spent in the company of exciting, like- minded positive people all eager to chat, listen and learn about each other’s experiences as founding entrepreneurs.
Although I did not achieve my goal at the beginning of the week of speaking to everyone on the course, I did manage to have 57 high quality encounters which as well as learning about their businesses, meant being able to pitch my business 57 times.
As for the learning, for any entrepreneur looking to establish an IDE (innovative driven enterprise), by identifying a beachhead market, looking at DMU (discovering the customer's decision making unit), LTV (the lifetime value of a client) and COCA’s (calculating the cost of customer acquisition) then this is the place to demystify these terms and put a plan in place to scale up.
There are 'doers' and there are 'donters' in this world –the 'doers' will make it their goal to be one of the Cohort 2 participants at Can Do Scale 2016.
It is an opportunity not to be missed.
-Kevin Davidon, Elevator Accelerator Founder
Information on Scotland Can Do Scale can be found on the website:
