The Fastlane Program could not have come at a better time for Willicroft. Every stage of running your business is key but the start up / scale up phase can be particularly treacherous. Three lessons in particular stood out: 1. The need to focus, 2. To have clear actionable goals across our team and 3. To be comfortable taking a step back from time-to-time in order to take a giant leap forward. We can't speak highly enough of the team (the Practitioners) who are running the program, both as people and mentors. We are now in a completely different position to when we entered the program 6 months ago and much better placed to make Willicroft the success it can and should be.
We believeManifesto
We believe that the Impact of innovative businesses is created in three steps:
1. Start-Up: Is the phase where teams invent and develop the technology, product and/or service
2. Get Ready to Scale: Is the phase where teams build the business engine around that innovation
3. Scale-Up: Is the phase where the teams build on their business engine and scale the company towards sustainable growth
Building a truly innovative business is not a sprint, it is a marathon!
Build your Business EngineManifesto
Venture teams that develop solutions toward renewable energy, sustainable food systems or green chemistry often take years or even decades, until they are ready to scale.
Popular start-up and scale-up thinking, unfortunately, underestimates the complexity of that middle phase, which we call "grow your business engine".
"Premature scaling can be detrimental to a venture"
Venture teams start overconfident in this phase but lose patience, customers and funding on their way to scale. They often have to end their journey prematurely.
Once milestones are missed, or investors lose patience and confidence, new fundraising often takes the attention from the business priorities and progress comes to a halt.
For capital-intense innovations the phase of "creating a business engine" proves complicated. Many demanding and high-risk projects run parallel and progress is often difficult to ‘sense’.
Venture teams with revolutionary innovations deserve patience, support and the necessary funds to fail, learn and grow towards their success and solutions the world needs.
We want to professionalise and structure the ‘scaling’ process for deep-tech ventures, by combining practices from ‘entrepreneurship’ and innovation management.
A methodological approach is necessary to help the teams to generate the right conversations with their investors and to identify the real ‘bottlenecks’ and get help along the way.
HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU NEED US?
Are you trying to get your head around planning, targets, team composition and milestones for your next funding round?
Do you have a technology developed beyond TRL 6 but find it difficult to get market traction?
Did you just close your first investment round and feel that you are behind your milestones before you even started?
Do you want to create more ‘focus’ around the right priorities while maintaining an overview of your overall progress?
Do you already feel lost before you even begin?
WHAT WE'LL BRING TO YOU
Fresh Pair of Eyes
We help you to come back to the “drawing board”: identify your core, structure your challenges and break them down into ‘activities’, a puzzle, which you and the team can solve. From there, we help you define clear targets for funding and market success. And we co-design a plan to deliver against that.
Frameworks
“No framework is a holy grail”. It’s not the frameworks, (and there are MANY!) it’s how we help you apply them to your specific venture, that’s creating the magic. So we feel free to apply the ones we’ve tried and tested, totally tailored to your teams and venture. Nothing is sacred!
Discipline, Accountability & Predictability
We help you monitor your progress so that your growth journey will become less ‘trial and error’ but more a controlled and intentional process. This will make your growth more predictable and your venture will become much more sexy and interesting for investors
No-NonsenseNo Frills
We have a practical, no-nonsense “outsiders-inside” approach and bring a robust sense of humour and real-life experience to our work with clients. That means that we combine best practices from innovation, strategy, growth, change management, operations, and leadership development and transform these into bespoke, real hands-on support. Additionally, we bring a valuable network of brilliant “accidental hero experts” to your “game” if and when needed.
Together we are all equipped to transform your company’s dreams & aspirations into measurable and tangible outcomes.
WE LOVE WHAT WE DO
WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY
Brad Vanstone
Founder Willicroft
For a company like PectCof, it is important to be able to switch from start-up mode to start building our business engine and systematically validating our assumptions. Each session with Anieke and Francesca gives the opportunity to take a step back from running our business and to reflect properly on the strategical steps that we need to take to structure our operations more efficiently. After every interaction with the Practitioners, our management goes back home with new insights and real actionable items, such as getting our product from pilot to demo-phase, getting validating our product at customers, and continuously challenging our strategy. We highly recommend the Practitioners to support your venture in this growth phase.
Daniela Ribezzo
CEO Pectcof
When you are in the process of growing up as a company and want to evolve your start-up to scale-up I would definitely work with Fran and Anieke! Scaling is hard and as founders we were struggling with our strategy after struggling with covid, which impacted our company and the essence of what we are doing. We were a bit lost actually. After several meetings and discussions Fran and Anieke proposed to us a scaling plan/program in which we firstly went back to our personal purpose and mission of our company. nWithin this process we had interesting sessions with our core team and just with us as founders. This hands-on approach really helped us to revise our strategy as a company but also on a personal level we learned a lot as founders!
Michiel van den Berg
Co-Founder Klup