Scotia’s Vision Achiever programme picks up steam

Scotiabank continues to lead the way in opening up avenues for budding local entrepreneurs by way of its Vision Achiever Business Training initiative.

According to a release, the programme aims to inspire both personal and professional development, helping business owners learn how to grow and build more profitable businesses through mentorship and coaching. Over the past two years, the Bank partnered with Action Coach; the world’s number one business coaching firm known to have helped thousands of companies achieve more profit and build stronger teams.

Fourteen small business owners graduated from the first instalment of the programme, which spanned two months and consisted of seven sessions, designed to impart the core competencies required for running a profitable business. The top three were awarded with cash prizes to help them further their business.

In October, the second cohort the programme began this time with 18 candidates (four more than the previous year). The course will span a two month period and consist of five sessions, designed to impart the core competencies required for running a profitable business. At the end of the programme, the top candidate will receive $25,000 to invest in their business.

This year’s training focuses on helping candidates grow their businesses and incorporates learning about the art of introductions and networking, the development of a 90 day business plan, behavioural assessment, styles of communication, the importance of understanding customers, advertising/marketing and other key business skills.

Recently, 18 Vision Achievers were challenged to demonstrate what they had learned thus far by giving individual business presentations as part of final grading requirements. In an expo booth styled environment, each entrepreneur was called upon to present their business to the class while fielding questions from the moderators – questions that were modelled after real-world interactions and experiences.

Following the series of lively presentations, the class launched into its final training session, in which the candidates learned about the principles of systemisation, which highlighted the importance of developing processes to make running a business easier.

This overall theme was broken up into several sub-topics; in understanding your business goals, our candidates looked at sales price, revenues and profits, as well as the “finished” vision for their business. This was followed by a lesson on key steps to achieving results. Candidates were taught how to build a simple system using rules and policies based on company values and business culture.

With such invaluable knowledge gained over the past two months, the Vision Achiever candidates have acquired the tools necessary to start a new chapter in their respective businesses.

Coming up next will be the social media aspect, where the public will be asked to vote for their favourite small business owner. In deepening Scotia’s commitment to the promotion and development of small business, the Scotiabank Vision Achiever Programme was introduced locally. This initiative was developed with the entrepreneur in mind – to help build capacity - so that they can manage their operations more efficiently and effectively.

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