Wednesday, June 28 & Thursday, June, 29, 2017
at the Easthampton, MA Campus of the Conway School
Wendi Goldsmith ’90 and Mitch Anthony, Faculty
Learn how to align your own ethics and purpose with practical business and communication skills.
Back by popular demand from its debut in 2016, this updated workshop builds upon participant feedback to share tailored insight, information and tools through an engaging interactive format. Come for one day or both, depending on your interest and need.
This workshop is for you if:
- You are an established socially-minded business who wishes to grow,
- You are a recent graduate seeking to convey your value as a new hire,
- You are a non-profit business leader who wants to work smarter, and/or
- You are an intrapreneur or early career employee who wants to guide your company toward a triple-bottom-line.
- Designers, planners, builders, suppliers, and service or product organizations small and large will benefit.
Day 1 focuses on how your personality and goals can shape internal business topics: entity types, business planning, financial management and the nuts and bolts of administration. For details on Day 1, click here.
Day 2 focuses on finding your brand promise, your promise to those you serve of how you help them. This promise is the foundation for all of your client attraction and retention efforts. For details on Day 2, click here.
Testimonials
Comments from participants in 2016 workshop:
“Conversational. Professional yet informal. Accessible.”
“Many people who care about sustainability feel it’s somehow anti-business, and in hindsight, many of my classmates and peers shared that view with me. Now I realize that is far from true. I wish this workshop had been available when I was starting out, and that somebody had dragged me to it!”
“Had good balance of bigger and smaller business owner perspectives.”
“The two-day workshop is a good amount of time.”
A retreat for perspective
Day 1: Your inspiration can shape a sound approach to life and business
Wendi Goldsmith, PhD CSLD ‘90
Leading a business or charting a novel career path demands motivation, resourcefulness, and rigor. Alignment between your values/passions, skills/resources, and career/business can make work inspiring to you and others. A poor fit causes more anguish, hardship, and risk than necessary. Knowing yourself is crucial to formulating realistic and clear expectations for your business life. Learn how your persona can become the cornerstone of how you structure the business itself, including updates over time.
Finding your “Calling” — Understanding your personal and internal drivers should guide how you approach your career and business choices
Many entrepreneur workshops emphasize how to pitch investors on high-growth business ideas, but this one focuses on finding the best fit for you. With the starting premise that your venture will be grounded in the sustainable and socially responsible values you hold, this workshop will step you through a process to define what business model and growth pattern fit your personality and resources. When the going gets tough (which it always does) it helps when your passion and sense of commitment can carry the day. How does your inner calling resonate with various business and career trajectories? Does a sequence or combination fit you better than one single choice? What steps could make that evolution simpler?
Converting your goals into organizational details to establish workings for short- and long-term success and alignment
We will use backcasting to lead us from where you want to end up, viewing backwards to where you are now. Part of that involves envisioning what, if any, exit strategy to target. Organization of your new or existing business will set the stage to taking you in your chosen direction. Learn what the features and trade-offs of different business structures are, and how they might relate to stages in growth. Learn the basics of typical contracts, including when and how to best use legal resources to support you. Learn the basics of financial statements and budgets and how they relate to your business plan. We will cover accounting principles including overhead vs. project-related costs, pricing related to competition, and non-financial metrics such as sustainability criteria.
Step away from working IN your business to devote a day working ON your business. This one-day module of the two-day program will better equip you to formulate or adjust your business approach so it works better for YOU. You will come away with resources and a refreshed sense of alignment between personal and business goals.
Day 2: Finding your voice. Communicating Your Promise
Mitch Anthony
The success of any business is contingent on finding your audience and communicating your value to them.
Clear positioning, strategic messaging and effective communications are uniquely powerful and efficient tools. Yet, typically they are used only by those who can afford to hire a branding firm. This workshop is for you if you are an individual or a team that wants to use the tools and processes that a big budget can buy, but you want to learn to do it yourself, in-house.
A day of discovery
This a special edition of Mitch Anthony’s DIY Brand Camp. Mitch has been helping organizations understand and use their story as a tool of transformation since 1982. In one super-condensed day, he shows you the tools and processes that he’s been using for more than 30 years to help hundreds of companies and organizations understand and utilize their own potential.
In a dynamic mash-up of classroom teaching, breakout groups, and personal check-ins, we start at the beginning: How do you help? Why do you exist? How will the world be different when you are successful?
With your new understanding of brand, you’ll then learn how to build a messaging strategy that furthers your own specific goals.
Make an emotional connection
A clear brand establishes an emotional connection with all of your audiences. It evokes recognition, goodwill, and trust. It sets you apart so you can be seen. It turns observers into participants. It improves the efficiency and effectiveness of your communications. And it turns casual browsers into brand ambassadors who will lend their credibility to their own networks.
In other words, a clear brand is the easiest and best way to communicate your practice’s impact.
Strong branding works from the inside out.
Your brand is not a logo. It is your promise to those you serve of how you help them. During this one day survey course we will help you to understand:
- How to understand who you serve and their needs
- How to understand how you meet those needs
- How to turn this insight into a brand promise that distinguishes you clearly and makes your impact obvious and easy to understand
Faculty
Co-Instructor, Wendi Goldsmith, PhD, CSLD ’90; Director, Center for Urban Watershed Resilience
Dr. Goldsmith regularly shares her wisdom on how to navigate business planning and operations rooted in triple bottom line values. She draws on her entrepreneurial leadership combined with 20-years experience on private company and NGO boards emphasizing sustainability as a core factor in business decisions. Through leading many workshops and listening sessions around the US on founding, growing, and differentiating businesses while overcoming common obstacles, she has distilled key points.
Wendi is an award-winning and widely recognized thought leader and systems-level integrator in the science and engineering fields, incorporating current research for inclusion in process, design, and construction. She was founder/CEO of Bioengineering Group (until selling in 2014), a consulting firm dedicated to the application of sustainability principles to the built environment. Wendi was a Federal Appointee to the National Women’s Business Council and was selected as Top Ten Women Entrepreneur by Fortune Magazine in 2010. She has served as Board Director on many local, national, and international NGO boards related to conservation, science, and education.
Co-Instructor, Mitch Anthony; President, Clarity.
Mitch Anthony is on a mission to redefine branding. He sees it not as a tool to sell things we don’t need, but as a powerful means to sell ideas we do. He works with organizations to help them translate their purpose and mission into messaging that resonates with and motivates primary stakeholders to engagement and action. A member of Conway’s Board of Trustees, Mitch is a skilled facilitator, team builder, and presenter. He has a track record of finding synergy, traction, and opportunity where fear, overthinking, and bureaucracy slow others to a crawl, and somehow, he makes it look easy. Mitch has built and developed corporate and product branding programs for such clients as Bloomberg Television, VH1, Church World Service, Microsoft, Lightlife Foods, Reebok, Avid Technology, and FX Networks.
He has proven time and again that brand discovery, design, and strategy are powerful tools that can transform not only your marketing, but also your organization and all the people in it. They are the cornerstones of clear agreement, and clear agreement is the foundation of organizational transformation. Mitch is the co-founder and principal brand strategist at Clarity, a firm that uses the branding, development, design, and editorial processes as tools for visioning, alignment and development. Prior to founding clarity in 2012, Mitch served as president and senior brand strategist at Titanium and the president and founder of Mitchell Anthony Associates.
Registration information
This workshop was held on Wednesday, June 28 & Thursday, June, 29, 2017 at the Easthampton Campus of the Conway School.
Sustainable Entrepreneurship Basics is a working retreat away from the distractions of the daily grind. The format is hands-on. Come prepared to work on your own practice’s, or your own personal, values and promise.
We gathered at Conway’s Easthampton campus in Mill 180, a freshly renovated, mixed-use historic mill bordered by the Manhan Rail Trail, from 9 till 5 each day.
Questions?
Call Bruce Stedman at (413) 369-4044.