Scaleup Academy is working with startups on adopting growth strategies for the new norm

Over the past three months our lives turned upside down and everything came to a halt due to COVID-19. However, at KAPITA we made sure that all of our programs continued running to avoid any delays in the progression of our startups.

At ScaleUp Academy so far we have carried out seven online sessions covering various topics to help accelerate our nine startups. Marketing and economics sessions were held by our Business Development Specialist Ammar Amin. He covered many strategic planning techniques like SWOT Analysis and USP (Unique Selling Proposition) Analysis and Growth strategy techniques. 

The startups utilized these techniques to undertake a deep business strategy analysis. They were able to understand and harness their internal strengths and external opportunities and minimize internal weaknesses and external threats. The USP analysis also helped the startups understand their product/service value and how to employ this to maximize their profit. 

Part of the ScaleUp Academy Program, KAPITA is hosted a session with Marwan Ahmad about Objectives and Key Results (OKRS), OKRs is a goal-setting framework for defining and tracking objectives and their outcomes. It can transform the way you set goals and achieve them. If you want to improve any performance, whether you're managing a team, a small company, or a big one, you need to measure how well your tracking is against your yearly objectives. OKR facilitates team alignment throughout the organization & tracks progress.

Finance sessions and workshops were run by AbdulGhani AlHassani; an Investment Manager at GroFin with over 12 years of experience in investment and SMEs. The sessions covered income statements, cash flow, balance sheets, risk management, financial flexibility, return on investment, etc.

Each startup received a tailored workshop to discuss its own financial position. They were able to use and apply various financial statements to determine growth, profitability, and to extract operations insights to help make financial decisions and overcome financial challenges. 

ScaleUp Academy is devoted to running online sessions regardless of the current situation. We believe that this will keep our startups motivated to achieve their business goals.

About the Program:

ScaleUp Academy aims at equipping entrepreneurs with the proper know-how to understand and overcome the challenges, and move forward to grow their businesses. if you have a business that you aim to scale it up,

 The Academy will admit founders and key team members into intensive general and tailored sessions for the period of 3 Months. 

The covered fields are:

• Finance/Capital and Cost efficiency
• Economies of Scale, Business model refinement
• Operational Excellence and Resource Management
• Business Development
• Advanced Marketing techniques

After completion of the Academy, each startup will receive “post-graduation services (Marketing Services)”. These services will run for eight weeks and are needed to scale the marketing capacity of the startups in the fields of Branding, Marketing Strategy, Digital Marketing and/or Advertising.

And the graduated startup will be more eligible to pitch their businesses to KAPITA Seed Fund and Iraq Angel Investors Network.

This program supported by GIZ and AsiaCell