The Challenge of Maintaining Momentum
As an Entrepreneur Support Organization (ESO), you’re deeply committed to helping small businesses succeed. You’ve likely seen firsthand the excitement and progress entrepreneurs make during your programs. But at ONOW, we found a challenging transition once a business owner's needs didn't fit well with a pre-made program, or what to do to continue supporting them upon program graduation. Many entrepreneurs start to struggle without ongoing support, much like a well that’s built but not maintained—it can quickly fall into disrepair.
The Problem: Maintaining Progress After the Program
One of the biggest challenges ESOs face is ensuring that the progress made during a program doesn’t fade away once it’s over. It's easier to motivate donors to fund initial projects or starting new businesseses. But without an ongoing maintenance plan, lasting impact is often lacking. This makes impact reporting difficult, and donor funding begins to dry up. Meanwhile, entrepreneurs are often left to navigate their challenges alone, which can lead to setbacks or even failure. This is similar to building a well but leaving it without a plan for maintenance—eventually, it stops providing water, and the community suffers. The same can happen with entrepreneurs who lose momentum without continued support.
Our Solution: Continuous Support for Long-Term Success
Imagine if there were a way to keep that momentum going, ensuring that the hard work you put into your programs continues to benefit entrepreneurs long after they’ve completed your courses, while being flexible and dynamic for everyone's unique route. That’s exactly what our platform offers. Think of it as a “well-maintenance program” for MSMEs—providing ongoing, AI-driven, chat-based support that helps entrepreneurs stay on track, grow, and succeed in a dynamic and difficult environment.
Key Features: How We Keep Entrepreneurs Engaged
Ongoing Check-ins: Just like a well needs regular care, many entrepreneurs need consistent support. Our platform delivers personalized, automated interactions that keep them engaged and motivated while giving mentors insight into unique challenges as they materialize - preparing them to offer higher-value advice without the scaffolding of a pre-made program. These features are powered by AI to give entrepreneurs a personalized and unique experience that improves engagement and retention.
Sustained Impact: Your programs are designed to create lasting change. Our service ensures that the progress made during your programs turns into long-term success, much like a well that continues to provide water to its community. The ongoing, and repeated interactions with businesses provide a critical touchpoint and data that can be utilized for long-term impact measurement and reporting. This leads to happier donors, increased funding, and data-driven opportunities for program improvement.
Scalable and Affordable: We know that resources can be limited, and margins continue to get tighter for ESOs around the world. Our platform allows you to extend your impact without expensive software or difficult integration processes. Mentors can support many more entrepreneurs while also reducing the prep time needed to provide quality services. We're early in our development journey and are seeking impact-minded ESOs to join our early adopter audience and create something great together.
Addressing Your Concerns: Why Our Platform Works
You might be wondering if this platform is right for your organization. Here’s how we can help ease those concerns:
Free Trial: To help you feel confident in your decision, we offer a risk-free trial so you can see the benefits firsthand before making a full commitment.
Proven Value: We grew up as an ESO in Myanmar. And our platform has been specifically designed for ESOs based on our successes and failures there. Additionally, we have already worked with multiple partners in different countries - showing the ability of our experience to integrate into existing operations and translate across borders.
Easy Integration: We guide you through the process, making it easy to adopt our platform without disrupting your current systems. It’s a seamless addition that enhances the work you’re already doing. Many organizations have data stored in multiple places and systems. Our tool offers easy ways for you to pull everything together from multiple systems to get the full picture of an entrepreneur's journey.
Mentor Support: Entrepreneurial journeys are dynamic and complex, and mentoring an entrepreneur through the many potential pitfalls is difficult. A structured program can help provide this foundation and curriculum for mentors, and many are worried about the time committment required to maintain this service without a defined curriculum. That's where the power of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) helps guide a coach into recommended topics and methods to reduce the burden without impacting quality. This is just now possible with recent technological developments, and we're excited to help mentors with the possibilities that are now unlocked.
The Payoff: Turn Short-Term Gains into Long-Term Success
By using our platform, you ensure that the entrepreneurs you support don’t just make progress during your program—they continue to grow and succeed long after, ensuring that your impact lasts for years to come and you can share the long-term impact of your operations with donors and stakeholders.
But What Else Is There?
We live in a time of many options - especially when it comes to software. It can be difficult to know what to use, when to use it, and the associated pros and cons of each. There are a lot options - and we've tried to use most of them ourselves. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools like Salesforce, Learning Management Systems (LMS), and spreadsheets from Google Sheets and Excel. Each of these established categories offers solutions for ESOs that are likely workable in many scenarios. But were never satisfied with these solutions, driving our desire to create something new for ESOs.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools
CRMs offer incredible flexibility and automation, but they are expensive to build and even more expensive to maintain - often requiring highly-skilled, full-time staff to manage and make adjustments needed for ongoing entrepreneurial support. Unfortunately, we find that value in CRM can degrade due to the inflexible nature of the platform. Resource-constrained users often create workarounds in spreadsheets outside of the system, and the main value proposition of automation and centrality of data is quickly eroded.
There are definitely cases when a fully-formed and maintained CRM is needed. But users should enter with the expectation of the high-resource requirements to setup and maintain such a system - especially in an entrepreneurial support environment where the need for program changes is much higher than the traditional, and static sales processes these tools were designed to serve.
Learning Management Systems (LMS)
These tools are great for one-way delivery of static content like a lesson or course. However, they're intended for more purely educational or knowledge-transfer services that don't require the back-and-forth interactions of ongoing mentorship. We think these tools definitely have a place in many ESO toolkits, but will struggle if applied to long-term support.
Spreadsheets
Spreadsheets are great, and we've used them extensively for entrepreneurial support services. They are hyper-flexible, easy to learn, and easy to find people with experience to manage them. They have also grown to incorporate more data engineering and AI-based features. We highly recommend this solution for projects or processes that are small in scope or timelines. However, if you have used spreadsheets long enough, you'll likely have encountered that process that used a spreadsheet longer than expected, and it's become an unwieldy beast to manage and maintain. And you're always hoping you don't fat-finger a cell and accidentally break the whole thing. Eventually - spreadsheets will reach their limit as we try to incorporate multiple data sources or use them too long.
The Next Step in Entrepreneur Support
We think that ongoing support of entrepreneurs is critical to achieving the long-term impact we all hope to create among entrepreneurs around the world. Just like building a well and forgetting about it will lead to many broken wells and limited impact, we see a gap in the entrepreneurial support industry that is failing to maintain and support our entrepreneurs over time. We all have an opportunity to improve this, and increase our impact. We’d love to show you how this works in action.
Your commitment to helping entrepreneurs is what drives real change. But it’s important to make sure that change is lasting. Our platform is here to help you do just that—by keeping entrepreneurs engaged, motivated, and growing long after your programs end.
Ready to see how we can help sustain and grow the impact of your programs? Let’s schedule a demo and explore how we can work together to turn short-term gains into long-term success.
Email nathan@onow.com for more details and next steps.
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