WellGiving WeekNote #6
End of week 6.
We have just finished our weekly Impact Central checkin via Zoom.
Gordon has informed us that we are now 25% of the way through the programme and 50% of the way through this first block on Leadership & Strategy. Crikey!
Today was the first day I’ve started to write my weeknote and found that I lack the energy I had in previous weeks. Each week I sit down with a fresh coffee and a million thoughts spinning around my head and an eagerness to bring you up to speed on the week’s events.
However, it’s cold and wet outside, there’s rain on the window, it’s a teacher training day and my kids are breaking the Internet with the relentless demands of Xbox, TikTok, Netflix and Youtube. I am a simple creature and for some reason I feel off my game.
So this week’s entry feels a bit flat. However, I believe in this process and that’s exactly what weeknotes are meant to do. They are designed to capture thoughts, ideas and feelings on the journey. They are not the rose-tinted highlights of an amazing idea turned Unicorn and an explanation of how easy it was to follow a simple 3 step formula. This is the journey of a startup, developing the unknown, aiming for product market fit with many ups and down and failures on the way. And sometimes these obstacles are purely mental and internal.
Actually writing this has lifted me and there’s definitely something about sharing and journalling in that statement…
So the focus of this week has been (drumroll)… Storytelling!
With 2 dedicated sessions with SL and the hugely talented Stewart from Amplify.me.uk
I don’t think i’ve ever met anyone with such energy and positivity who can summarise a business so succinctly and poetically within seconds, when I struggle to articulate the basics.
The format of the day was to Pitch — a 2.5 minute pitch!
“What? What did he just say? I’m not ready to Pitch! I can only do 30 seconds.” — some of my initial thoughts
In the morning, I literally struggled to make a coherent sentence. I was so nervous! I thought my conversational style would get me by. I was easily the weakest of the Cohort and this played on my mind a lot. Luckily we were given 1-on-1 time with Stewart and time to prepare for the afternoon session when we would present back an updated energised pitch.
Gordon and SL recorded the sessions so I was able to playback and process the advice. I started to create a structure to clearly present my WHY, the inspiration for the idea and exactly where we are today. With a much improved pitch I headed into the afternoon session confident.
I have to say at this point that the pitches from the other cohort members were transformational. Wow! They were informative, personal and authentic and delivered with passion.
Then it was my turn…
I had focussed so much on the words and preparing a script that when it came to the actual delivery I tanked. It lacked personality and my Brummie tones probably don’t help. I had some really good core concepts and points but as Stewart pointed out, I take 3 sentences to get to the point instead of just using the last sentence that smashes it.
However, this made me realise that it’s not a one time event. I now have a much improved structure and content and it’s about experimenting, testing and refining. The goal is to be able to memorise it and deliver it with my personality — more Paul.
Away from the structured learning of Impact Central I have been really busy reading upon the concepts of the Lean Playbook and Testing Business Ideas, as mentioned in my previous post. I’ve been swapping Netflix comedies at night in favour of YouTube videos on Beyond Lean & Agile by Marty Cagan and Product Market Fit by Dan Olsen.
I’m focussed on updating the Business Model Canvas and extracting the hypothesis and how to test these. I completed a really good customer development interview with a CSR Manager from a corporate and stayed in the problem space, not mentioning my solution once.
I also ran my Team session on Monday first thing to bring everyone up to speed on the past 5 weeks of Impact Central, my ideas, the changes I see we need to make to the product and what I believe is an assumption that needs validating.
With Impact at the heart of why the product exists and our motivation to do good, it was so great to hear the team’s perceptions of the problem, our solution and the session culminated in exploring and committing to a specific target market and a completely revised revenue stream!
All in all, despite my opening statement, it’s been a good week. I’ve stayed focussed, explored alternative approaches to some of our thinking and made progress.
Some weeks will be easier than others. Some days we don’t always feel like it. But by doing a simple action, like writing a weeknote, perspective and gratitude can be found in the simplest of methods.
I feel a lot better. I hope you do too.
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Photo Credit: https://unsplash.com/photos/4gKHjKG7ty4
