Standing-Up Your Business
This short course aims to give participants an insight into the operational mechanics of setting up a small business. A learning-by-doing approach is adopted whereby participants are set a series of team-based tasks which, in combination, result in the delivery of a functioning operating model for a new business. The first 25% of the programme is dedicated to decision-making, design and simulation, with the remaining 75% focussing on building, testing and evaluating the operating model. Four key business components of a modern enterprise have been selected: website, ecommerce, payments gateway, and accounting package.
At the end of the programme, each participant will have contributed to the setting-up of a prototype small business via the design and build of a working operating model; will have tested it by running trial sales trans-actions (and their associated accounting entries) through it; and will have evaluated its performance from a customer and business perspective. To accelerate the programme's delivery, a real-world business has been selected for participants to simulate: Angaza Ltd is an innovative social enterprise start-up, based in Rwanda, upcycling redundant, vinyl-based advertising hoardings into attractive and unique fashion accessories. The operating models that students implement will be used to trial-sell one of the company's most popular products – brightly-coloured laptop bags. Participants will be able to use Angaza's website and webstore, (www.angazarwanda.com), as a reference site to guide their design and build activity. |
The course is in six parts:
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