The first Fempower Africa’s SME workshop of the year, was a business model canvas workshop. We hosted 52 Female Small Business Owners at the NG_Hub, Yaba, Lagos. There is a definitely a knowledge gap that exists for all entrepreneurs not just female entrepreneurs.
We need to first understand our business model, before we can track performance, profitability and even scale.
The Business Model Canvas is a visual chart with elements describing a business model. It helps us ideate, describe, and understand almost all the important aspects of a business venture. It summarizes the entire business plan. One can hardly innovative or pivot quickly without the aid of this very important tool in Business.
This workshop held on Saturday 19th January at the Facebook Nigeria hub, in Yaba, Lagos so we could help women owned businesses think innovatively about their ideas, figure out their customer segments…
Over 52 female owned-businesses were represented. 13 service based businesses and 12 product based businesses were represented. Akua Mensah, a Business Coach and Consultant for Tech-enabled Businesses, facilitated the session.
[gdlr_core_space height=”30px”]HERE IS A DETAIL ABOUT THE IDEAS SHARED AT THE EVENT
Sandra Ajaja, founder Fempower Africa gave a brief of what Fempower Africa is about and also gave reasons why this workshop was organized.
Akua then started on Business Model Canvas. She was really passionate and made sure every female understood what the Business Model Canvas was. The attendees included entrepreneurs, side hustlers and day workers and she was able to carry everyone along.
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Some of the articulated reasons for being at the workshop were:
To articulate business goals
- To see how business goals align with personal goals
- To test assumption of Business Model Canvas knowledge
- To get exposed to various business frameworks
- Practical and holistic understanding of the BMC
In 90 minutes, Akua led the workshop and discussed the Business Model Canvas’ first component, Customer Segments.
Amongst the Attendees, there were about 13 Service-based businesses and 14 product-based businesses.
Akua introduced a quick framework on how to segment your potential market
- Type it – answers WHO? Business or Individual
- Divide it – this divides based on Demographics, Geography, Psychographic, Behavioral
- Size it – answers measuring your Business Size either Bottom up or Top down.
The attendees were divided into groups to discuss different businesses and apply the framework.
Our women were introduced to the concept of the Business Model Canvas and how it can help them strengthen their business. They were given a clear understanding of their potential customers and the customer’s pain point so they have a specific target market. They had the opportunity to communicate and understand their customer’s pain points and the value their business provides.
[gdlr_core_space height=”30px”]Sean Burrowes, from Ingressive was then given the floor to talk briefly about Ingressive and what we do and also about EDG Africa. He explained the benefits of joining the Ingressive community and the Slack channel.
Indeed, these business Owners were engaged in an immersive hands-ons and intensive workshop around customer Segmentation, the missing piece to scaling enterprise.
It was an immersive and hands on session. We can’t wait to do more of this.
The Future is Female, The Future is Now.
Fempower Africa is a social enterprise that seeks to train, teach and equip women in Africa towards entrepreneurship (providing scalable solutions) and leadership, (driving positive change in their communities) through technology and innovation.