LEAP - Alumni Support
Industry: Economic Development
Service Provided: Program Design, Coaching, Leadership & Team Development
August 2024 - Present
In August of 2024, we began to work with the Lansing Economic Area Partnership (LEAP) to begin to support their alumni for expansion events. These expansion events include new location, new revenue opportunities and other growth opportunities. LEAP was in an interesting position because they had more than 200 alumni that had gone through their programs, but they didn’t have a dedicated person focused on alumni success.
Project Goal
Create a comprehensive alumni support program to support LEAP alumni in their business growth.
Design Approach
We needed to prioritize many factors in the design of the program.
Consistency: I don't have a consistent person to call on after the program was completed so it was important to us to prioritize consistency in any of the programs that we executed which meant people and systems.
Empathy: Understanding that many of the program alumni are coming from different places in their lives and business journeys so it was important to be patience because this program was supporting scaling businesses along with hobby businesses that are comfortable in their current growth.
Accountability: We know that entrepreneurs need mentoring and coaching often times just to hold them accountable which was important for us to design around.
Communication: This program is owned by the small business and innovation team at LEAP.
Understanding the Landscape
We started with data and doing some initial strategy sessions with clients to begin to get qualitatively and quantitative insights. After analyzing, we noticed the main trend - there wasn’t enough hands on and available support to answer their questions and move things forward. We knew that meant we needed to figure out how to be there so having questions answered wasn’t a barrier.
Implementation
Additional Capacity through Training Support
We extended the team capacity in providing support for various trainings. We started with a training at an existing training called Tech Scene, but noticed that there was lower attendance. Through a strategy session, we developed a Business Made Simple training together that increased participation by 10x over the total of the workshop series.
Strategy Intensives
The back half of 2024 was focused on learning about the Lansing entrepreneurial ecosystem and deepening relationships with the existing partners. We kicked off 2025 with focused strategy intensives with clients. What we noticed was that every session in 2024 was running over and that was a key indicator for the design of the whiteboarding strategy sessions that we begin to pilot in Q1. We partnered with the small business team to pick 8 businesses to hold whiteboard strategy sessions along with follow on support that includes leadership development and procurement support.
