LeapIN 2020 - Week 7

Can you believe it is the last week of LeapIN 2020! We certainly cannot! The time has just flown by and we are so excited for all of our cohort members! The team here at Leap Junction is going to miss our cohort when they go but we are so proud of everything that they have accomplished over these 7-weeks, and we look forward to watching their success as they continue to grow!

Day 24- With full knowledge that this was our last week together, we spent some time today focusing on our Life After LeapIN! We were joined by six of our community partner organizations this morning! Each of them shared a little bit about their services and how we could connect with them as we looked to grow!

We were joined by Nicole and Josh from Propel Entrepreneurship at Western University, Laura and Thomas from Libro Credit Union, Sarah from Futurpreneur, Kathleen from Shopify, Brittany and John from London Economic Development Corporation and Brab and Collen from Downtown London! These amazing partner organizations helped us to understand what our next steps might be as we continue to grow after the accelerator finishes!

Day 25- Today was all about the law! We had a full day of legal considerations and we got started early with Nicole from the City of London who shared with us some information on bi-laws and local licensing! Next, we had a facilitated fire-side chat with our friends at DealPrep! Thomas and Adam shared with us some information about Founders Agreements and how we could use them in our businesses. We also got signed up on their amazing library of business contracts which, will help us as we grow! Finally, Micheal from Siskinds LLP joined us to discuss business law and answered a bunch of our questions about the legal considerations of our businesses! Thank you so much to all of our legal professionals for their knowledge!

Day 26- Our last day of workshops! We played a lively game of 'two truths and a lie' to start the day! Some of our cohorts have done some interesting things! After the game wrapped up, Kelsey lead us through a review of our goals that we set in week 1! It was fun to see how some of them have changed and some of them we have achieved! Finally, we took some time for ourselves and focused on our wellness; Kristen from Soul Runners taught us about healthy habits and we all took some time to do a beginner yoga Video together! We ended the day in a place of zen as we prepared for our Demo Day, tomorrow, where we would get to share our businesses with the world!

Day 27- Demo Day! No programming this morning as Coach Dave, Kelsey, and Andres wanted us to get ready for the afternoon when we would have to pitch our businesses and answer questions. We all jumped online at about 1:30 to do a quick run-down of the event and then started up at 2:00! Kelsey, Andres, Dave, and Darlene all had wonderful things to say about us and the program, then it was our turn! We had each recorded a 2-4 minute video showing off our business! It was so fun to see what each of us had made and the audience loved them! After the video pitches, we each had our own 'rooms' where people came to ask us questions, it was so nice to see their reactions to our businesses! We wrapped up at about 4 p.m. and went to a private room so we could say goodbye. Check out the video of our demo day HERE!

LeapIN 2020 has been full of joy and challenges! From not knowing if the program was even going to run, to pivoting to an online program; it was all new for everyone! But, it was full of joy! We made new friends, new connections, and our businesses grew as we grew! Keep in touch with us through the links below to see what we're up to over the next few months and reach out if you have any questions!

Tyler from Celebration

Sharlene from Real Model Mom

Jared from JR Welding

Swaraj from Taxably

Christine from Qualia Hub

Kelly from Studio KVR

Aaron and Omar from Nitro Route

Jesse from The Hot Sauce Co.

Maxwell from Face Two Face Vintage

Chintan from Greenovation - Eco Dinnerware

Kristen from Soul Runners

Chris from Bernese

**You can find more about them on our social media @leapjunction!**

If you'd like to learn more about LeapIN or Leap Junction, book a virtual appointment! Or, feel free to send us your questions and comments at leapjunction@fanshawec.ca!

LeapIN 2020 - Week 6

Week 6! LeapIN Online is flying by! We are having such a great time with all of our businesses in the cohort and our amazing presenters! This week we built on some of our sales and community building knowledge from last week and moved into focusing on our financials!

Day 20: Today we started our day with a visit from Michele Beaudoin, Vice-President, Student Services at Fanshawe College! Michele joins us every year to learn a bit more about our cohort and provide support where she can! It is always a good day when she visits us! For our workshop, we were joined by Scott Currie, a sales expert with experience in large corporations and with his start-up. Scott took us through the sales process and some sales negotiation strategies! This was great because we are starting to understand our business and our customer more and more so it was great to practise some selling!

Day 21: The focus today was on creating and participating in community! Our very own Andres Garzon lead us through our day; we started by sharing what we admire about each other and then had some time to discuss our community and culture and how those things impact our business. Andres organized a wonderful panel to join us! Robin from Antler River Press, Alayna from Softflirt, and Savanah from Downtown London all joined us to discuss their work in the community and share how we can get involved. LeapIN is its own small community and it was a pleasure to learn how we could expand it as we grow! That afternoon we were joined by some of our Fanshawe College staff and friends to practice our pitches! Alex, Annette, Kevin, and Rebecca all joined us for some intensive pitch work as we get ready for our Demo Day! Thank you all so much for your help!

Day 22: On day 22 we focused on taxes! Taylor from the Cooperators joined us for our morning session. Taylor took us through HST, reporting our income, and write-offs! We also were able to ask him some great questions about our specific tax needs. After focusing on taxes, we took a step into our bookkeeping and we were joined by Kim from the Lawrence Kinlin School of Business! Kim showed us some great software and taught us about tracking our expenses and payments! A big thanks to our financial professionals who joined us today!

Day 23: Thursday is Brag and Drag as Skill Share day! Christine from Qualia Hub was up for Skill Share and Lisa Kurlap from FML Adventures joined us for our Brag and Drag! After our awesome morning, we continued our financial training with John and Phil from the Small Business Centre! John and Phil taught us all about the various financial statements we need to be preparing and shared with us some information about financing and accounting in general! Off we went for the weekend to get our books in order and to prepare for the last week of the program!

Thank you so much to our financial, sales, and community presenter who joined us this week! All of these things are super important to our businesses and will help them grow as we grow! Next week is our last week together and already we are getting sad to know the program is ending but excited to implement all the knowledge we have gained!

Curious about our cohort and their businesses, check them out below!

Tyler from Celebration

Sharlene from Real Model Mom

Jared from JR Welding

Swaraj from Taxably

Christine from Qualia Hub

Kelly from Studio KVR

Aaron and Omar from Nitro Route

Jesse from The Hot Sauce Co.

Maxwell from Face Two Face Vintage

Chintan from Greenovation - Eco Dinnerware

Kristen from Soul Runners

Chris from Bernese

**You can find more about them on our social media @leapjunction!**

If you want to start a business but don't know where to start, book a virtual appointment! Or, feel free to send us your questions and comments at leapjunction@fanshawec.ca!

LeapIN 2020 - Week 5

A short week but another great week here at LeapIN online! Welcome back, readers! This week we covered sales at the beginning of our week and then moved over to studying diversity, inclusion, and social enterprise at the end of the week. As always, we learned so much from our speakers and continued to grow as entrepreneurs!

Day 17: We started the day with our value proposition roulette, but with a twist. Each member of our cohort was given a specific audience you had to pitch to get them out of their comfort zone. It is so great to see how each of the entrepreneurs is growing with their pitches as we get closer to the end! For the learning portion of the day, we mixed things up a bit! Instead of our usual guest speaker workshop, we all completed a course together! The MaRS Selling for Entrepreneurs course taught us how to build a sales strategy, explore what selling is, taught us how to develop sales opportunities, and how to ask for and a close deal. Our crew was given some homework to observed sales in the real world that evening before we signed off for a (somewhat) early lunch!

Day 18: Normally, we do our Brag and Drag exercise on Thursday but since we had a special program planned for Thursday, we did it a day early! This week we were joined by Leap IN alumni, and all-around awesome human, Lliam Buckley, owner of Corduroy Sound who led us through our Brag and Drag, thanks Lliam! Then we moved on to Skill Share! Sharelen from Real Model Mom taught us about how to take a good photo and Jared from JR Welding showed us the process of fabrication! Our workshop today was led by Isaac Morgado CEO of MVMT Strength. Isaac delivered an awesome presentation around Marketing and Sales with a specific focus on the first three steps of the Sales Process. We learned a lot from Issac and we are excited to learn some more about sales next week!

Day 19: Today was a really special day for us! Today was had a LeapIN take over from Pillar Non-Profit Network / Innovation Work. We are lucky at Leap Junction to have the support of Pillar and they joined us today to lead us through some discussions around diversity and inclusion and speak to us about social enterprise. We had a very rich discussion and we are so grateful to have been given the opportunity to have these difficult conversations with each other in a brave space.

Overall, a short week but a good week! Next week we will be examining sales and community building a bit more in the first half of the week and then transitioning to learning about accounting, bookkeeping, and finances for our businesses in the second half. Stay tuned to learn more about our cohort and their progress!

Curious about our cohort and their businesses, check them out below!

Tyler from Celebration

Sharelen from Real Model Mom

Jared from JR Welding

Swaraj from Taxably

Christine from Qualia Hub

Kelly from Studio KVR

Aaron and Omar from Nitro Route

Jesse from The Hot Sauce Co.

Maxwell from Face Two Face Vintage

Chintan from Greenovation - Eco Dinnerware

Kristen from Soul Runners

Chris from Bernese

**You can find more about them on our social media @leapjunction!**

If you want to learn even more about our cohort, you should join us on August 20th at 2:00 p.m. for our demo day! Sign up HERE to reserve your spot for this virtual celebration!

If you want to start a business but don't know where to start, book a virtual appointment! Or, feel free to send us your questions and comments at leapjunction@fanshawec.ca!