WELCOME TO BUSINESS LAB!
Hannah Grimes Business Lab™ (formerly Startup Lab) is a fast-paced, interactive business program of seven 3-hour classes, held over seven weeks, and culminating in a public presentation — a pitch — of participants’ businesses. It is designed to help local entrepreneurs create, refine, implement, and present their business. Business Lab for business helps people define the fundamental purpose of their business and the core value it offers to their customers.
The program covers the essentials of business strategy, finance and profitability, marketing and sales, business planning, and project implementation. It is based on a proven foundation of business education and research, but fine-tuned and adapted to be a practical, immediately useful tool box for business building. And it’s accessible and understandable, even if your participants have no business background or formal business education.
Hannah Grimes has offered a variety of business startup and development programs since 2006. We first created a six-month program called “The Entrepreneur Project,” which, in 2011, evolved into “Startup Lab.” Over time, we’ve adapted and advanced. We’ve improved on things we saw were working and discarded things that didn’t work as well.
In 2021 we rebranded Startup Lab to “Business Lab™ The No-Nonsense Tools Your Business Needs to Flourish,” in large part because we discovered that the program was attracting — and helping — many local businesses that had launched and did not view themselves as “startups.” We’ve learned that the program assists business at many stages of their development. These businesses are typically seeking to reinvent themselves, move away from a back-of-the-envelope approach, and position themselves for growth.
We have developed a detailed guide on how to run the program and offer it here for FREE to any community interested in using this framework to create their own local event.
We hope that the Business Lab Program Guide will inspire and support you in running an entrepreneurship program in YOUR community! Hannah Grimes staff can answer quick questions for you, but if you’d like more in-depth guidance on running the program, we also offer consulting by the hour. Please reach out to programs@hannahgrimes.com if you have a quick question or need a deeper dive.
What people have to say about the guide:
“We cannot express our gratitude enough for Hannah Grimes allowing us to utilize the Business Lab curriculum. The guide has been a tremendous resource that has allowed us to offer a valuable program to help support our local business owners/entrepreneurs. I already have a waitlist of aspiring and current entrepreneurs who would like to participate in the next cohort!” -Patric Moore, Skowhegan Center for Entrepreneurship
