#BTColumn – Pack your talent

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed by this author are their own and do not represent the official position of the Barbados Today.

by Donna Every

I’ve just finished Pack Your Talent, a seven-week program sponsored by Caribbean Export and delivered by Taiana Mora of Nex Consulting from the Dominican Republic.

It was designed to help professionals and service providers to prepare, package and market their services for export.

The program was phenomenal! First of all, it was action learning, so as we went through each topic, we had to immediately implement what we learned in our business. I am a great advocate of action learning.

In Barbados, I find that we are often focused on getting a certificate to show that we’ve gone through a program or we’re focused on assessing what was taught.

While neither of those is bad in themselves, it is quite possible to pass a test and get a certificate and still not be able to apply what you’ve learned.

However, when you demonstrate that you have understood a concept by applying your knowledge right away that, to me, is the ultimate goal of teaching and learning.

Every week of the program we had homework which required us to focus on our service offerings and to identify the customers that we are targeting with the end result of creating a specific offer, that is, a packaged service that we can take to the market.

I was very excited to be able to come up with my offer which is a program to provide training, coaching and specific interventions to women entrepreneurs who want to grow and scale their business and be able to take time away from their business and know that it is still operating efficiently in their absence. I am now in the process of packaging and branding it to take it global.

Pack Your Talent featured two individual coaching calls which gave us the opportunity to discuss the specifics of our business and to get feedback from our instructor, Taiana Mora.

There were also Implementation Labs where we discussed what we were doing to implement what we had learned so far and we had (still have) a closed Facebook group in which we bounced ideas off each other, shared relevant information and received feedback on our value propositions.

The climax of the program were Business to Business (B2B) Zoom meetings in which we were paired with businesses and given an opportunity to pitch our offer to potential business partners, some of whom were also on the course and some from outside.

I was delighted to chat with two of my fellow participants on the B2B. One is a lady from the Bahamas who helps charitable organisations access grant funding.

The other is a lady from Suriname who has a brand and marketing business. She gave me some great free advice to market my online tour Vaucluse Goes Virtual, which I will be launching in the next week or so. We also discussed forming a strategic alliance where we can partner to add value to the services we deliver to our clients and to help each other access new markets.

Another call was with an artist from Aruba who holds art therapy workshops. I’m very excited to possibly partner with her to add this to my offer for women entrepreneurs, especially as this was not an activity I had considered before. Her workshops deal with issues such as stress management, which is essential in these times.

My final call was with another lady from Aruba whose strength is coaching women entrepreneurs. Although my program includes coaching, rather than seeing each other as competing in the same field, we discovered that since we coach in different areas we would be able to offer complementary services to potential clients and add value to our offerings.

Connections like these are key to exporting our services to markets in the region, but our ultimate goal should be to export internationally, recognising that we have the talent to compete in the global market. We have now learned how to pack our talent and once we package it well, we will be able to successfully export it.

One of the other takeaways I had from the program was the constant focus on ensuring that there is a digital element to our businesses, especially now that people are online more than ever. I immediately designed a completely new exportable, digital product called Vaucluse Goes Virtual, a virtual tour based on my historical book Vaucluse to be targeted primarily at the Diaspora, visitors who cannot get to Barbados and friends of Barbados.

Based on what I had learned in Pack Your Talent, I first created an Export Canvas (a version of the Business Model Canvas) for the virtual tour and I contacted my videographer, wrote a script, and we spent two days taking footage around Barbados.

What was also great was the availability online of footage taken by drones, which my videographer was able to acquire for a reasonable sum of money to add to the tour. I haven’t even seen the complete tour yet, but I am very excited based on the snippets that I’ve been shown.

I give sincere thanks to Caribbean Export and Nex Consulting for this wonderful initiative. The program gave me fresh excitement for my business and helped me to fine tune my offerings and my target market. And I’m not the only one. Many of the other participants said the same thing.

Pack Your Talent was the best and most effective training program I have ever taken. My goal now is not only to use what I’ve learned to export my services, but to help others to do the same so that (as I said in an earlier article) if people cannot get to Barbados, we can take Barbados to them.

Donna Every is an author, international speaker, and trainer. Visit her website at www.donnaevery.com or email her at donna@donnaevery.com.