It was our pleasure to learn more about ENTREPRENEDU Mentoring & Coaching Programme with Orfeas Voutyras, Senior Advisor at Corallia.
Please, briefly introduce yourself and tell us more about ENTREPRENEDU Mentoring & Coaching Programme’ goals and benefits?
My name is Orfeas Voutyras, and I work as a senior advisor at Corallia, an incubator, youth entrepreneurship accelerator, and multi-cluster facilitator established in Greece. My primary focus is on activities that support the growth of the Greek space ecosystem and Greek startups by providing technical due diligence and business consulting services. I hold a Master of Electrical and Computer Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, where I am currently pursuing a PhD in the same field.
The mentoring programme aspires to assist young entrepreneurs with the first steps of their journey from ideation to execution and commercialisation. In other words, to help teams move from an innovative idea (conceptualised during the ENTREPRENEDU hackathons) to a functioning product and a profitable growth model.
As a consortium, we have integrated a blend of e-learning and interactive mentorship to offer all teams a tailored learning experience. In other words, participants in the programme receive the training and consulting benefits of a high-level business accelerator.
The Programme includes 6 mentoring modules and yours is about “Entrepreneurial Business Planning”. Can you tell us a bit more about the module itself? What mentees can expect from it?
The goal of this module is to equip participants with the knowledge and skills to craft a robust and persuasive Business Plan, and actually help them write the very first version of it. Emphasis is given on critical aspects such as market analysis, strategy formulation, operational planning, and financial projections. The module as a whole can help the teams strategically plan their business journey, align their team towards shared goals, and convincingly present their venture to potential investors or stakeholders.
If we want to get into details, through this module, mentees can expect at the very least to:
- Understand the importance of a business plan, its key components, and how to begin drafting one for their start-up;
- Conduct a market analysis, including competitive analysis and customer segmentation, and develop a suitable business strategy.
- Create budgets, financial forecasts, and a plan for financial management for their start-ups.
The participants of the Programme are winning teams of three HackTheBusiness competitions organised by ENTREPRENEDU. In your opinion, what are key potential takeaways for our participants after they conclude the Programme?
Due to the fact that the programme covers so many topics of the entrepreneurial journey, I would say that the most important takeaways are related to the most common reasons new startups fail. These are the lack of Product-Market Fit, the lack of a clear Business Model, neglecting Marketing and Sales, failing to onboard the right team members, and not adapting to change, to name but a few. I am confident that, after completing the programme, participants will be able to tackle (or, at the very least, identify) these threats and exploit their strengths accordingly.
