Five Tips For Applying What You Learned At Startup Scaleup 2017

At this year’s Startup Scaleup, you heard inspiring talks from subject matter experts, learned a thing or two about growing your own business and made valuable connections. But what happens now? How do you go about implementing all of this knowledge in a real-world setting?

Here are a few tips to help you get started:

Nurture Those New Connections
Startup Scaleup is a great place to forge new relationships and expand your professional network. But the end of the last session does not signal the end of your learning or connecting, as long as you stay in touch with all of your new contacts.

Whether you discussed meeting for coffee, promised an introduction or hoped to share a sample of your product, you’ll need to follow-up quickly in order to nurture these new relationships. Consider carving out 15 minutes today to re-connect with these individuals via email. Start your message with a personal, relevant mention of the conversation you shared and suggest catching up over coffee or lunch. It’s that simple.

In the video below, JumpStart President Cathy Belk offers more helpful hints for keeping connected.

Capture Your Ideas While They Are Still Fresh
After a day of brainstorming and meeting new people, you head is probably swimming with ideas. But these big ideas start to fade fast, so it’s important to capture as much as you can while it’s still relatively still fresh in your mind,

Even if you’re unsure how you will execute on these big ideas, take some time to jot them down and create a rudimentary action plan for each of them. Start with the ideas you believe will have the most immediate positive impact on your business and be sure to note any potential issues that you feel may make it harder for you to implement these ideas. These notes will become very helpful down the line, as your memories fad and your shift back into day-to-day work mode.

Establish Realistic Goals & Deadlines
In a perfect world, you would be able to implement all of the ideas you just wrote down all at once. Realistically, that is impossible to do.

If you don’t currently have the bandwidth to write ten new pieces of content per month, design a new employee handbook by the end of next week and double the size of your team by the end of the year, that’s okay. Don’t discourage yourself by setting the bar unrealistically high. Instead, fine-tune your goals so they make sense from an implementation perspective, then start matching each one with a realistic deadline that makes sense for you.

Get Team Buy-In
Coming back from a day-long conference with a long list of new ideas makes perfect sense to you, but make sure to share some context with the team that will help you implement those big ideas before you start adding to their to-do lists.

Giving your team a strong “why” and actively enlisting their help in developing thoughtful plans of execution behind the ideas that you’re seeking to implement will go a long way toward getting them on board—especially if they weren’t there with you when inspiration struck.

Tailor Our Advice to Fit Your Situation
Rarely does a strategy or tactic discussed at a conference work as a one-size fits all solution. Startup Scaleup is no different. Much of the advice our speakers gave can and should be tailored to fit your unique industry, needs, capabilities and goals.

When considering what to implement, or what to ignore, you’ll need to fall back on your sound understanding of your business, your team and its key strengths and weaknesses. We try to pick topics and speakers that will make you think, but it works best when you put your own spin on what you’ve heard.

Not only can these tips be applied to Startup Scaleup, they’ll also help you get the most out of the other educational or networking event you attend. Discover more of these opportunities by visiting the JumpStart calendar.