The Learnable Business Experience
Today, I will be taking you on a ride through my internship journey with Genesys tech hub in 2022, particularly the Learnable Business Session.
Now, what is learnable?
Learnable is a 6-month product development internship program organized by Genesys Tech Hub for young individuals who are passionate about building a career in the software industry. The major programs run by Genesys are software programming and product design. In Genesys, Everything is Learnable.
Overview of Learnable Business Session
The Learnable Business session is what you can describe as a fast-paced business school. The Learnable Business Session lasted for three weeks, where each team was to ideate and form a brand that will deliver a service or services to real-life customers. In the Learnable Business Session (LBS) the interns were divided into five teams, where each team was made up of about eleven people.
The LBS featured presentations, lectures, tasks, and practical sessions with mentors and colleagues. Powerpoint presentations were regular during the LBS. There were individual presentations and group presentations. In the individual presentations, each intern gives a pitch, based on his/ her Pitch topic, while the group presentations hold during task submissions.
The lectures covered a range of topics which includes:
Business Sustainability, Models and Strategy
The StartUp Game: Defining your Business, Building a Brand
Great Business Idea or Great Idea
Customer and Unique Selling Proposition
Technical Writing
Budgeting
Cost Control
Contacts and Business registration
Achieving Project Goal
Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning in Market penetration and development.
The tasks in the Learnable Business Session were generally referred to as Class Tasks (CT). The tasks which were given after each lecture was expected to be implemented in each teams’ brand/business.
Every business involves managing people, resources, operations, and time. To emphasize this in the LBS, we had a practical session where we learned the bases of Project Management, using a project management software tool, called Microsoft Project.
The Goal
At the end of the LBS, each team was expected to make as much money as possible and give a presentation on their achievements, based on their; Business Ideas, Business Plan, General Strategy, Team Cohesiveness, Creativity, Operations, Revenue Model, and Financials.
Now! What could have been my teams’ Business Idea?
Let’s just say the fun begins here! Shall we?
To come up with a feasible business idea we had to consider a couple of options. We had to consider our target audience, the resources available, our talents, and of course the problem we would like to solve.
Our business idea revolved around solving the problem of businesses that lack visibility in the market and promoting their brand recognition through designing proper brand identities like flyers and logos.
Our business name was TushUp.
Why TushUp?
In Nigeria, Tush is a term used to describe luxury and affluence or used to show that a subject is of a higher class. The term TushUp could then be described as lighting up something, in our case a business, in such a way that it shows class, luxury, or affluence. Or put simply, it could mean bringing life to a business.
Did you know that 90% of shoppers make judgments about a product based on color alone? It is no wonder companies spend thousands of dollars on choosing the perfect color, shape, and logo design. Having a professionally designed logo and general branding plays a vital role in digital marketing for small businesses.
When a brand design is done right, the company will see an increase in sales from new and existing customers, have a chance to stand out among competitors, and increase product value. However, branding/rebranding the logo unsuccessfully can lead to the complete opposite — losing customers, facing negative criticism, etc.
Did you also know that most Small — Medium scale businesses in Nigeria, encounter various challenges? Some of which include:
Access to Financing
Visibility and Marketing
Our customer segment included; all genders, ages between 18 years to 45 years, Small-medium scale business owners, NGOs, in all locations.
In order to solve the problems of these businesses, TushUp aimed at making these businesses stand out, also helping to spread brand recognition, through providing top-notch designs such as fliers and logos at a low-cost but keeping quality in check.
Who is TushUp?
TushUp is a Nigerian-based company that specializes in revitalizing businesses through design. TushUp is committed to creating top-notch brand designs and solutions to help our clients stand out from the crowd, grow their businesses, and realize their marketing goals. Yes! That’s our business idea.
What do we do in TushUp?
Tush Up offers two main services, which are Logo and Flier design. In our business line, offering different packages to clients sells more than just offering one package. The timeline for projects in TushUp ranges from 2 days to a week depending on the package our customers opt for and our budget ranges from 5,000 to 16,000 depending also, on the packages our clients opt for.
At the start of the business, we ran a valentine’s promo, going for a 20% discount on our packages.
To increase our visibility in the market, we leveraged our company social media handles company website and individual social media handles.
My Personal Experience
The idea of learning and actually running a business for me was nerve-wracking. Firstly, as a team, we nominated leaders in order to organize ourselves and understand our specific roles. I was nominated as the Team Coordinator for my team, which was made up of three sub-teams:
Product Design Team
Marketing Team
Finance Team
As the team coordinator, I played the role of CEO and major Stakeholder for the business TushUp. Being in the position of a team coordinator, was indeed mind-opening as I was responsible for the delegation of tasks to the team members, monitoring the performance of team members through the sub-team coordinators, conducting team meetings, communicating goals and targets, and quality control. I was also responsible for reporting back to our facilitators on work done and individual team performances. We did face a lot of challenges during the course of the business. Some of which included :
Poor Power supply
Poor network connectivity
Work overload from team members that were students.
To fully comprehend why the above challenges were cumbersome, it is important to note, that in Learnable Internship, we had two groups of interns, interns in the physical track and interns in the virtual track. My team was grouped under the virtual track. It becomes clearer to grasp how these problems affected our work pace and general productivity. However, every problem does have a solution. It was quite difficult to manage at the start of the LBS, but I soon observed that among the team members, there were students and non-students, and also some teams especially the Product Design team, seemed to have more workload due to the nature of our business in TushUp.
In order to increase the general productivity and speed of delivering of tasks, I took certain measures, when delegating tasks;
Pair students with non-students
Pair Product Design team members with other team members, to reduce workload
Assign crucial tasks such as presentations to multiple team members, in case of unavailability due to network or power failure.
My team members made the journey a cakewalk. The icing on the cake remains the fact that my team, TushUp, ranked the first position at the end of the Learnable Business Session 2022 with a total of 77 points out of 100 points. And yes, we did make a lot of profit. Are you curious about the profit? Well, make sure to follow me, give me a clap, and stay tuned on this page!
The TushUp Team
An Insider list
Shout out to my amazing team members Glory Okafor. C, Aruogu Chidiebube, Anyadiegwu Roseline Amarachi, Akinde Adeolu, IWOUNO OBIAMAKA PRINCESS, Joy Okwudire, Bassit Owolabi, Aniugbo Hillary, James Harrison Somto
