Week 2: Summer Venture Program 2018
After a relaxing Memorial Day weekend, it was time to get back into the swing of things with the second week of the Summer Venture Program.
The week begun with team updates. This was a chance for our fifteen teams to reflect on and share their successes of the previous week, ask each other for help, and shout out anyone in SVP who helped them achieve their goals. One of our key principles in the Summer Venture Program is to lean on each other for support and ask each other for help. It is crucial to utilize your network and we try to instill this in our teams whenever we get the chance to.
Lunch and Learn with Andy Tollison of Babson’s Speech Center
After team updates, we moved forward with our first ever lunch and learn. To further explain, a lunch learn is a time for our entrepreneurs to learn a little bit about business all while eating a delicious lunch. This past week, Andy Tollison, from Babson’s Speech Center, taught our teams about the importance of communicating with impact (blog post soon to come). Our entrepreneurs took invaluable lessons from his talk and are ready more than ever before to effectively share their business with the world.
Dondoctor Hot Seat
We ended the day with a Targeting and Prospecting workshop lead by the program’s director, David Chang. In this session, our teams, firstly, defined and prioritized who they are trying to target, and secondly, discussed ways of generating and qualifying leads. Teams shared their best tactics and practices for reaching out to their targets. For instance, Ralph Haddad from TastePal exclaimed that by reaching out to his customers via direct message on Instagram, he was able to get a whopping 60% reply rate. Other businesses decided they would then try this tactic as well.
The next day, we headed on over to the Babson Boston campus to listen to Felipe Acosta, the founder of Dondoctor, pitch his business during our Hot Seat exercise. After receiving feedback, Felipe focused on fixing the flow of the pitch. With the help of Salimata Bangoura from Nanny A La Carte, Dillon Galynsky from Smask, and Ralph Haddad from TastePal, Felipe was able to successfully rebuild part of his pitch. A special shout out to Felipe and the Dondoctor team for being selected for the 2018 Mass Challenge Cohort!
William Palmer Eyewear Hot Seat
We ended the second week of SVP with another Hot Seat. William Tanadi, of William Palmer Eyewear, pitched his Indonesian based eyewear company and even brought in some of his stylish and affordable glasses for us to try on! During the Hot Seat rebuild, Felipe from Dondoctor, Jess Lynch from Wish Route, Jake Maude from BikeLord, and Shaymaa Gaffar of Shay Jaffar, all helped William clarify his businesses’ competitive advantage.
Although the week was short, it was very productive for our entrepreneurs!
Save the date for the Summer Venture Showcase: Thursday July 26. Follow all SVP happenings on Twitter and Instagram with #babsonsvp!