Firestarter Academy have partnered with the LI to develop courses on ‘Better Business Development’, ‘Practical Business Planning’ and ‘Building a Winning Team’. These are exclusively available to Landscape Institute members at 50% discount on normal rates for a limited time only, so act quickly to secure your place on the courses available this year to get your practice ready for 2021.
Helping landscape professionals find their pathway to better business growth
Earlier this week, The Landscape Institute launched a brand new initiative for members with a range of exclusively discounted training courses from Firestarter Academy. These courses have been developed in partnership with The Landscape Institute and are designed to help Landscape Institute members to win more business, create the necessary building blocks for growth and build winning teams.
When launching this key initiative as part of her vision to support small businesses better with a strong and supportive Landscape Institute, LI President Jane Findlay said:
“Running a business requires skills that we either intuitively have, or learn through experience. We all face similar challenges and often need help to get through them. This is why I have asked the Landscape Institute to establish a Business Support Programme for our members.”
Practical training content relevant to the Landscape sector
It is always interesting to gauge the current situation and general views of an audience to set the tone and ensure we are presenting content that is relevant to what people want to see. At the beginning of the session we ran a number of quick-fire polls, which provided us with some very interesting insights into the current thinking of the landscape sector.
For example, 65% of the audience said that planning for 2021 is really difficult, and the same number also said that business development is not something that comes naturally to them. Similarly, in light of the current pandemic and its impact on the sector, only 5% were confident with articulating their strategic intent and delivering their plan. Also, with many landscape practices facing competitive challenges in both winning new business and retaining existing clients, only 25% of our audience were clear about what differentiates them from other practices.
During the online taster session, Firestarter Academy Managing Director, Chris O’Riordan provided attendees with an overview of the three courses we have created for Landscape Institute members, designed to address these challenges and more. The courses are:
- Better Business Development – view the course
Becoming better at selling and win more business by learning the fundamental skills needed to short-cut your route to improved performance
- Practical Business Planning – view the course
Creating the necessary building blocks for growth by gripping your strategic thinking and turning it into a meaningful plan that you can execute
- Building a Winning Team – view the course
Learning the key skills and processes needed to recruit, train and manage high performing teams that will consistently deliver results.
There were also a number of useful exercises presented in the taster session that participants could undertake and learn from immediately. Over 50% of attendees told us they would do the following exercises in the near future:
- Nailing your 3 year and 1 year strategic intent
- Doing the Linked In A/B business development exercise
- Selecting your ‘top 10’ accounts and building a detailed plan for them
- Doing a deep ‘buyer painpoint’ exercise to work out how to differentiate
More information on each of these exercises can be found in the recording of the taster session, but for a more in-depth approach you can see the full details and dates of the courses available and book your place on the Firestarter website.
Positive Feedback
Feedback from attendees on the taster session was excellent, with all survey respondents saying the content was relevant to their business and 100% saying they would recommend it to others. Everyone was asked what the biggest takeaway was for them from the session, with answers including:
“Learning how to use pain points to understand what clients are interested to buy from our services and use it to the advantage of the business and differentiation.”
“I need to find time to focus on this!”
To put things into context, Jane explained how she had benefited in her own practice,
“At Fira, we recognised that we had a number of challenges, including an over-reliance on certain sectors and certainly an over-reliance on me. Firestarter helped us to develop our senior team, grow our business, make it more resilient and now that is paying dividends, which is so important at this time.
I really want to see our sector thrive and to take advantage of the new opportunities in front of us. I want us to be professional and well-organised.”
The courses available from Firestarter Academy are exclusively available to Landscape Institute members at 50% discount on normal rates for a limited time only, so act quickly to secure your place on the courses available this year to get your practice ready for 2021. You can view all the current dates and register at the Firestarter website here.