Business Game Plan sessions are multi-week facilitated small groups designed to help owners and leaders of businesses make a plan to grow and scale their business. Facilitators will coach participants to help businesses make positive adjustments as we move past a Covid-19 pandemic economy. These groups are best suited for businesses who have been open at least two years.
BGP: Leading Decision-Making for Changing Times
A Three Part Group Session September 2, 14, & 30
Are you facing hard decisions about how to reach your business goals, especially during periods of social and economic change? The tools and approaches of Adaptive Leadership (A.L.) may be what you need to help you navigate this challenge. A.L. is a research and time-tested approach for leading change. In this three-part, facilitated, small group counseling program you will work with coaches alongside a cohort of business leaders facing similar challenges while creating the opportunity to view change as a tool for better decision-making, innovation, and creativity, and gain insight about how to support you and your staff in becoming “change competent.”
This program is grant funded and is offered at NO COST to participants. Similar programs cost around $1000 per participant.
Sessions for this Group:
Session 1: Innovation, Change, and Leadership
Friday, September 2, 9am-12pm – in-person
Objective: Introduce core ideas and skills that build the adaptive capacity required for “change competency” among business leaders.
Outcomes: Participants will be able to explain and apply core concepts of change competency, understand leadership in the context of change processes, and recognize how individual assumptions and instincts about leadership issues are both assets and challenges. This will allow participants to more readily self-assess their skills related to adaptive leadership, and to identify specific ways they need to grow their capacity to anticipate, plan for, and respond to change.
Session 2: Making Decisions to Support Your Goals During Great Change
Wednesday, September 14, 6-7:30pm – online/synchronous virtual, Zoom
Objective: Identify key roles in managing current and likely social and global challenges facing your organization with a focus on deploying the appropriate decision-making strategies to different kinds of challenges.
Outcomes: Participants will be able to apply new concepts and strategies locally to their business/organization, and build on conventional management paradigms to grow leadership modes and processes that lead to strategically aligned decisions. Participants will gain the ability to understand and apply familiar and conventional management strategies in new ways that better respond to change as well as gain insight into new management paradigms that can complement and/or replace conventional approaches.
Session 3: Enacting Change Competency
Friday, September 30 – 9am-12pm – in-person
Objective: Apply the principles of adaptive leadership to actual and/or hypothetical situations, and lead organizational cultures through common reactions to change.
Outcomes: Participants will be able to design and deploy new processes to current, specific anticipated change in their small business with emphasis on anticipated loss, anxiety over unfamiliarity, risk-aversion/inclination, navigating best/likely/worse case scenarios, etc. This session involves an interactive method of practice that follows a path of application, feedback, revision, and re-application. Participants will gain the ability to self-coach, and coach other organizational leaders in applying adaptive leadership with a more comprehensive perspective on change and responding to change.
Facilitators: Eli Jamison, Ph.D. & Christian Matheis, Ph.D.
Eli Jamison, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Management Practice in the Virginia Tech Pamplin College of Business
Jamison is a practitioner-scholar focused on questions at the intersection of power, social responsibility, and policy in the service of socially just outcomes from the classroom to the corporate. Her research and teaching focuses on critical considerations of the policy and other structural conditions that enable and disable the possibilities for more impactful leadership leading to a more equitable global society. Prior to Virginia Tech, she served Radford University for 12 years in multiple capacities including Director of the Leadership Development Center and Director of the Master of Business Administration Program. Eli has over twenty-five years of experience across public, private, nonprofit and governmental sector organizations in the fields of higher education instruction, educational administration, leadership training, and organizational development consulting. Currently, Eli is in her second term as a Trustee and is Vice Chair of the Roanoke City School Board.
Christian Matheis, Ph.D. is faculty in Community and Justice Studies in the Department of Justice and Policy Studies at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC
In 2015 he completed his Ph.D. in the Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought (ASPECT) at Virginia Tech with a specialization in Ethical and Political Thought. Matheis specializes in scholarship and practice that bridge social and political philosophy, ethics, public policy, and direct-action organizing. In particular, his work emphasizes how both philosophy of liberation and the strategies enacted in liberatory movements can play a key role in guiding philosophers to address contemporary ethical, political, and economic problems. His research and teaching concentrations include topics such as solidarity, refugees, feminism, race, indigeneity, power and policy, and global justice. In addition to his regular teaching and research, he provides training in areas of human relations facilitation, intergroup dialogue, grassroots direct-action organizing, and on other topics. Matheis is co-editor of Migration Policy and Practice: Interventions and Solutions (2016), and Transformation: Toward a People’s Democracy (2021).
Business Game Plan Fall '22 Cohort
You wouldn’t go into a game without a plan to win – your business is no different.
In a 9 session group, participants will meet professionals in various fields such as Legal, HR, Banking, Marketing and Finance, and create relationships with other business owners or leaders and mentors from the SBDC Lynchburg Region. Businesses will come away with a strategic plan for their business. The ideal participant will be able to attend all the meetings as an active participant. This program is designed for those who have been in business at least two years. Preference will be given to businesses in the Lynchburg Region.
Are you interested in joining the next cohort (likely late Fall 2022)? Fill out this interest form:
Topics
Week 1:
Challenges, Risks, SWOT Analysis, Pivoting
Week 2:
Revisit Hypotheses, Testing, MVP (Minimum Viable Product)
Week 3:
Market – Products/Services Mix Adjustment, Pricing, Sales Strategy Changes (SEO, Sales Funnels, Strategies)
Week 4:
Improving Financials – Revenue, COGS, SG&A, Profitability
Week 5:
Improving Financials 2 – Local COVID Relief, Additional Capital Requirements (Debt and Equity), Burn Rates, Cash Flow Strategy
Week 6:
Legal Compliance Check (Operating Agreement, Contracts, Licenses, Taxes, Insurance)
Week 7:
Success after this class, Mentors & Advisors
Week 8:
Grow the Right Team, Re-Org
Week 9:
Gearing up for Scale – CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost), CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), Customer Purge, Various Revenue Streams
Topic order is subject to change.
About the Facilitators:
Jamie Reynolds, SBDC Mentor
Jamie Reynolds serves as Business Advisor with the SBDC – Lynchburg Region. Jamie is also the founder of FinTeam Business Consulting, and has spent over 22 years in various Finance and Operations Leadership roles with companies such as: Toys “R” Us, Georgia-Pacific, Electrolux, FLIR, and Genworth Financial. His keen insight into Business Analytics, along with his love for Financial Analysis, allowed him to not only determine organizations’ decision-making needs, but to also develop the financial tools and models crucial to making those decisions.
Codie Cyrus, SBDC Mentor
Codie Cyrus serves as an Advisor with the SBDC – Lynchburg Region. She is a co-founder of C&C Piping and Fabrication, a welding company which specialized in industrial repair. Codie is especially talented at working with service businesses who are looking to expand their market, understand their processes, and grow their business.
About GrowthWheel:
Business Game Plan will use the GrowthWheel system as part of the curriculum. GrowthWheel helps entrepreneurs build their businesses through a simple actionfocused process that stays true to the way most entrepreneurs think and work.
