Our Village United: ELEVATE

Brief

Our Village United is a entrepreneurial support organization that is dedicated to supporting the growth of Black solopreneurs and microbusinesses across the United States through small business training programs aimed to grow operations and scale their businesses.

Challenge

COVID-19 affected many Black-owned businesses who operated brick-and-mortar stores which resulted in mass layoffs, temporary shutdowns, and a huge decline in sales. Our Village United’s goal was to support 100 Black-owned businesses in Atlanta, Georgia by providing resources, tools, mentorship, training, and wellness support to help these businesses grow from sole operators to thriving businesses with multiple employees.

Solution

Surthrive was responsible for developing a capacity-building end-to-end program solution for Our Village United’s newest incubation program, ELEVATE. Our team was tasked with designing the programs OKRs, curriculum, lesson plans, worksheets, program activities, surveys and implementing program management software tools.

Curriculum:

Surthrive carefully crafted a curriculum designed to help Black-owned businesses transitioning their brick-and-mortor businesses online to reach new customers outside of their geographical location.

The curriculum was structured in a 12-Week cohort-based incubator program were our team created 10-Lesson Plans and 8 Templates & Frameworks divided into 4 learning modules: Operations, Marketing, Sales, and Fundraising.

The curriculum also included a syllabus, program calendar, and custom program activities such as Workshops, Office Hours, and Peer-to-Peer working sessions.

Objectives and Key Results (OKRs):

We helped Our Village United develop key objectives for the program which included:

Increase sales to create a livable paying wage for business owners to go full-time
Hire at least one new employee to grow from a sole proprietorship to a business
Develop one strategic partnership that relieves work and scales business operations

… And key performance metrics to track the progress and success of the program:

# of Units Sold and Revenue Generated
# of Employees or Contractors Hired
% of Revenue from online sales

Program Evaluation:

To collect as many data points as possible and track the progress of entrepreneurs throughout the program we developed 300 program evaluation questions delivered in 22 surveys.