East Hants Business Technical Assistance Program - CEED | Centre for Entrepreneurship Education and Development

Technical Assistance in starting a new business or growing an existing business

East Hants has partnered with CEED to support entrepreneurs in starting up, scaling, or growing their businesses. The Technical Assistance Program provides support in three areas. The Incubator program for entrepreneurs starting a business, the Accelerator program to help existing businesses expand and grow, and the Advisory Service to provide support for a specific business issue or opportunity.

Incubator

This intensive 6-week program brings you together with other aspiring entrepreneurs to validate your business ideas and work as a group to make them a reality. It’s about active, dynamic conversations to promote experiential learning, peer collaboration, and critical thinking. The discussions will push you to examine your business concepts in a safe environment. Support and guidance are provided by entrepreneurial advisors with over 20 years of experience starting, scaling, and empowering businesses.

In this program, you will:

Learn to understand and communicate your business’s value proposition
Refine your business roadmap and ideas
Develop a dynamic business model
Cultivate the mindset needed to plan and succeed
Actively conduct customer discovery and validation
Learn tactics to manage finances for profitability

The program includes: fifteen hours of interactive curriculum delivery; three one-hour, one-on-one advisory sessions; and a three-month subscription to Live Plan, an online business plan platform where the participants will develop a fundable and actionable business plan.

Accelerator

This program is focused on your needs as an existing business. If you are trying to scale your business, or you are facing a bottleneck in your growth, the Accelerator program can help you move your business toward its growth goals. In six intensive sessions that are tailored to small and mid-size enterprises, you will work with entrepreneurial advisors, who have extensive expertise in scaling and growing businesses.

In this program, you will:

Combine design thinking with specific business acceleration principles, tools, and methodologies
Design and plan your organizational foundation and business acceleration model
Challenge growth assumptions and hypotheses
Benefit from peer-to-peer participation and professional advisory sessions
Develop your growth strategy and business model
Balance your resources with the processes necessary to establish an active organizational structure

Advisory

Sometimes a business problem is more suitably dealt with one-on-one with a subject matter expert. The Advisory service allows an entrepreneur to access one of the subject matter experts at CEED to assist them in working through a business issue with a specific or limited scope. Advisory assistance is available in the following areas: