Tag Archives: founders

Leadership, Mental Health, News

The Soke launches Founders Development Programme to provide knowledge & skills to company founders

Mental health and wellness clinic The Soke today announces the launch of its Founders Development Programme, a first-of-its-kind course which has been designed to provide vital knowledge, understanding and skills to founders at the helms of fast growth businesses.

Partnering with founders and investors, the programme will be delivered by a multidisciplinary team of psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, senior leadership coaches and media experts, to support founders in developing successful, sustainable leadership.

The Programme has been designed in response to research from Harvard Business School which listed the most important skills for founders of fast growth businesses. These included: choosing co-founders, appointing key talent, splitting equity, recruiting advisors, and managing a board (88 per cent), as well as setting and communicating vision, managing culture, ethical dilemmas, and cross-functional conflict (82 per cent).

The Founders Development Programme will include the following core modules, as well as others designed to teach and embed good leadership practices:

  • Psychological assessment
  • Leadership vs Management
  • Practicing emotional and social intelligence
  • Communication
  • Conflict management
  • Creating and sustaining corporate culture
  • Exerting influence
  • Training and delegation
  • The pro-active model for decision making
  • Key relationship mapping
  • Skills needed for the board and investors
  • Financial knowledge for non-financial people
  • Media training
  • Systemic psychotherapy

Maryam Meddin, founder & CEO of The Soke, comments:

“Whilst many founders may believe that they naturally possess the necessary characteristics for successful leadership, the reality is that few come to
the fundraising table with the array of skills needed to successfully lead an organisation from inception to growth and beyond. This is particularly the case when founders are required to run a company not purely to satisfy their own ambition but to meet the expectations of investors and other stakeholders.

“The conflict between a founder’s passions and creativity and their obligation to deliver on stakeholders expectations can be the cause of destabilising dilemmas and must be addressed through early training and support. We are therefore excited to launch The Founders Development Programme, a first-of-its-kind, multi-disciplinary course to provide knowledge, understanding and skills to founders, equipping them with the tools to lead their companies to successful and sustainable growth.”

News

New book daring entrepreneurs to dream, scale and achieve

Many innovative entrepreneurs start their businesses with a great idea and a dream to make a profound difference. However, scaling and ramping up operations can quickly turn dreams into stressful nightmares without the right tools and support. Right now courageous business founders are facing particularly massive challenges to keep their business afloat. Within their new book Dare to Scale, insightful co-authors Warsha Joshi and Evan Le Clus give these entrepreneurs the strength and validation to reconnect with their dreams and chart a success course to achieving them using easy-to-follow concepts to burst through the stress ceiling.

Warsha is a business scaling up coach specialising in strategy, people and leadership for the SME founder and a skilled entrepreneur in her own right with three successful exits under her belt. Evan is an accomplished finance and operations professional with 30 years in the corporate field. Today he is a successful business mentor for SMEs where his forte is enabling CEO’s to become financially astute. Together they help masterful technicians step into their tribe of like-minded entrepreneurs and transform into masters of their scaling business.

Dare to Scale’s smooth and multi-faceted methodology draws on many real-life examples of successful business growth and simplifies the business elements necessary for scaling. This proves to entrepreneurs that their challenges are personal, but not unique, and when all business levers are properly tuned the scaling process becomes an enjoyable one.

Dare to Scale helps readers to reconnect with their original big vision, trigger questions for self-awareness and to up the ‘Scalability Quotient’ (SQ) of their business. The SQ score indicates how ready a business is for rapid growth and is based on the five elements for successful scaling; strategy & financing, people & leadership, cashflow & systems, efficient operations and business model & revenues. Each of these is interrelated and within the subsequent chapters the authors dare founders to expand their knowledge on each of the five elements including learning how finance works, how to build efficient operations, how to lead and inspire a team, and the importance of reviewing regularly.

Warsha and Evan are passionate about the entrepreneur eco-system and fostering a robust global support network. Being at the top of the organisation can be isolating and lonely. What entrepreneurs need is a support system; some fresh perspectives from like-minded people who will help them to innovate, be a friend to their business, hold them accountable for some of the finer details and help them with the bigger picture. Coaches, mentors and a business peer group all play an invaluable role for those daring to scale.

Dare to Scale is the perfect read for entrepreneurs and founders daring to dream big, take action and stand up and be counted. With the ambition to grow and transform, supported by like-minded individuals, courageous entrepreneurs are empowered with the framework, tools and self-belief to write their own history.

Dare to Scale by Warsha Joshi and Evan Le Clus is published by Panoma Press and is available now on Amazon.