Business visioning and customer discovery for women entrepreneurs | Learnings from ground

The highlight of and learnings from the visioning and customer discovery workshops.

Getting the glimpse of what the new normal means to your business is something most probably every entrepreneur across the globe had done. But getting to do it with several other entrepreneurs and analyzing your business from outside your comfort zone is such a game changer.

With the changing ways of living, the business landscapes have been drastically changed, there is a massive 360 change in customers reality, their needs, their expectations and their limitations.

The same business that could have made a revenue of say 2000$ after every metric tan sale can now make up to 10000$ after each sale because demand is high and the market requires more. These are live examples of experiences that we have see during last week’s workshops.

At the same time, with the changing customer realities, essential business are experiencing higher market growth while businesses that provided more non-essential services and products are experiencing a challenge to stay afloat or have been forced to make a compete 180.

All of these we have see in the last week.

Now most of the times our visioning workshop is done in the beginning of the year with over 40 female entrepreneurs, mapping and creating a countability list for themselves to track for the year.

This time it was different, a lot has changed. So we took in groups of 3 to 6 entrepreneurs for the business visioning exercises and used a personalized-approach .

These are the learnings :

Funding for sustainability and resilience.

There is still a lot of funding support needed to keep women-led businesses stay afloat and even more interesting since most of them are actually in the essential-business, need funding to grow their business enough to respond the the needs to the market.

Accelerated digital adoption.

Both customers and businesses are forced to rely on digital platforms and digital connections to serve and be served. Now although that is a wide known reality at the moment, there is a need to help the women entrepreneurs understand the tools and how to use them favorably for their businesses.

Helping the entrepreneurs understand their markets and what tools actually accelerate them reaching their markets is very important. There was a case of most businesses being on Instagram while Facebook turned to be the right platform for their market.

Structured support system.

While lack of information to where they can get support, where they can get funding, market trends and lot more is still an issue, structured support for women entrepreneurs is a major issue.

Having a clear ecosystem pipeline from the government level, to the ecosystem level on how to support these systems is very crucial. Them knowing where to go for what kind of funding, for what kind of technical support, for what kind of learning saves them from a lot of preventable hiccups.

Mental health support.

Girls and women were already experiencing massive pressure even before the pandemic, now more than ever their economic and social contribution is so important and needed concurrently.

A woman who could afford being a stay home mum and be a part-time entrepreneur is forced to take on her business at full force to support the family. That creates strain to both her, the business and her societal-organization (family etc.)

Advocacy and provision of mental help to entrepreneurs is very important, because hey, rule of the lid is real. If our economy depends on businesses performing, our economy depends on physical and mental health of business owners.

These are the four major lessons that we have learned among others, given that we are on the mission to make it possible for women entrepreneurs and women-led businesses to have profitable growth, we are looking forward to working with different partners to respond to the above needs.

Written by Vanessa Kisowile — SheFound