Can Women be Hackers?

Absolutely! This spring we hit the road to find out how to help women entrepreneurs growth hack their business as part of the Deming Center for Entrepreneurship Rural Coloardo Workshop Series. Faculty members Cynthia Banks and Visda Carson traveled to both Glenwood Springs and Vail, Colorado teaching "Growth Hacking for Women Entrepreneurs," a robust and thought-provoking workshop about growth hacking for small business.

Over 70 women attended the workshops representing a wide range of ideas from real estate to wellness, clothing, tourism, financial management, hospitality, and more. Their biggest business challenges? Finding the right customers with the right message so they maximize marketing spend and rapidly increase revenue. Perfect for growth hacking!

Shake it loose, then shake it up

Our workshop participants met us at 5:00pm on a Thursday night… after a long day of work.  You can imagine what type of creativity we were ready to produce with the day’s challenges still in our minds!  We shook it loose with some fun creativity conditioning exercises including networking bingo (harder than you think!) and inventions. Then, we shook it up by setting the stage with a lesson in design thinking. Design thinking is all about putting aside your assumptions and we wanted our attendees to be primed to learn, grow and elevate their business.  

It’s all about value

How many times do we tell someone about our business with a long list of product features, intermixed with your mission statement and covered in blanket statements about differentiation? Eyes may glaze over, and you leave wondering if you were truly clear about “why” they should buy from you. In this short workshop, our women entrepreneurs produced a robust list of their business features and benefits, secured a vision for their target customer and produced a cohesive value statement to align their key entrepreneurial message to the consumer. Clarity = Powerful value.

Why do we love what we love?

We cry at commercials because the advertiser touched a nerve in our hearts. Just think of those super bowl ads! Research proves women AND men make decisions mainly from emotions. So why shouldn’t an entrepreneur think about how their business can feed the emotions of their customers and, at the same time, feed their own passion for raising their business? We helped these women entrepreneurs think about their values and how these can be woven into key messaging to customers making their business value authentic and trustworthy. 

Now, let’s grow!

The entrepreneurs worked hard to whittle down their long list of features and benefits into their value statements and mixed in a healthy dose of emotion to give it the rocket fuel for success. Their final few hours were spent learning about technology and strategies to really growth hack their enterprise. We talked about strategies to acquire customers, activate their first experience, retain them, and get them to give you referrals. We brainstormed ways to design reciprocity content, invented planned spontaneity and tackled innovative ways to offer incentives that don’t break your bank.

After our 10+ hours together, we sent them on their way with a completed workbook filled with their own ideas for how to growth hack their business. It is a learning process and not easily completed in just one short workshop but we hope the entrepreneurs left with new skills and tools to create amazing change in their businesses.  We can’t wait to hear about their progress!  One participant wrote the day after to say:

“I wanted you both to know how incredibly motivating your program was and how it got me the ultimate new business idea leveraging growth hacking!! I am in the process of flushing out the details and would love to get your insights and guidance. It taps into “gal power” and I truly believe that it will be a win-win-win opportunity.“  

Gal power rocks!

Thanks to the Colorado Small Business Development Center for helping us expand our reach into rural Colorado!