Last year we announced our partnership with Mike Alpha; a community interest group supporting the military community, to offer free strategy days for veteran-owned businesses to help set a clear path forward for business growth.
So far, we have been lucky enough to host two very different businesses; HR4K which hosts an online store of veteran and lifestyle products as well as the HR4K Gym & Bootcamp in Hereford, and Amodigo, which specialises in bespoke coaching, leadership, and human performance programmes.
Condensing strategy creation into a single day’s workshop is no mean feat(!) and it’s been a fantastic experience and learning opportunity for everyone. For me personally, it was so exciting to offer our collective knowledge and experience to businesses who don’t usually benefit from well-established or specialist agencies. There’s such value in a range of TKF team members joining for the day as it means we can pool all of our backgrounds, skills and experiences into one. Of course, we spend every day doing this, but when we’ve got a matter of hours to build the strategy from scratch, it’s quite a thing to witness! Ideas were tumbled between us whilst we shared the info needed amongst each other in real-time, vetoing or shortlisting as we went along.
During the discussions, our Head of Planning, Christian Taylor said something that’s really stuck with me; “Strategy is just as much about what you’re not going to do”. We kept our focus on creating a strategy that would make the most of all touchpoints and data we have available, and we didn’t dwell unnecessarily on options that wouldn’t meet our objective.
Christian was delighted to showcase our FlightPath™ planning approach, leading in navigating the session and ensuring key considerations were addressed: “We’re very proud of our approach to planning and strategy and it was great to see the process tease out the big questions to create light bulb moments. This helps us to focus our attention on key audiences, activities and revenue streams. It’s especially important to have this focus when we’re creating an end to end strategy in one day!”
Ben Duncan, Senior Client Account Executive at TKF said: “I found the Mike Alpha session extremely insightful, as I am sure the client did too. It was great to be a part of the conversation for such a young business as they developed and explored their objectives to determine what they can do to effectively grow, achieve, and exceed them.”
We have received fantastic feedback from our Mike Alpha partners and can’t wait to welcome our next; if you want to find out more about our partnership with Mike Alpha, catch up on our launch article here.
By Niki Grant, Head of Search.