Multicultural Entrepreneur Program

Dr. Yasmin Davidds, founder of the Latina Executive Leadership Program, in partnership with the USC Marshall School of Business and the USC Latino Alumni Association, presents the first Multicultural Entrepreneur Program of its kind.

The program is comprised of three main components:

Development of Multicultural Entrepreneurial Leadership skills through Harvard’s highly acclaimed “Authentic Leadership” curriculum.
Integrated study of a comprehensive step-by-step systematic business growth model.
A network of successful Multicultural Entrepreneurs to help business owners focus on their most critical business issues and increase business capacity.

The Multicultural Entrepreneur Program is focused on unlocking the growth and job creation potential of multicultural-owned small businesses in California through greater access to business education, financial capital, and business support services. The program is co-sponsored and hosted in partnership with the USC Marshall School of Business and the USC Latino Alumni Association.

Program Overview

Who Should Apply?

The program is intended for multicultural business owners with limited opportunities to otherwise access a business education designed to enhance small business success. Applicants should own a business that is poised for growth, have been in operation for at least two years, have at least two employees (including themselves) and business revenues between $75,000 and $10 million in the most recent fiscal year.

Why You Will Benefit From this Program

A key component of the Multicultural Entrepreneur Program is a highly practical 8 session business entrepreneurship curriculum focusing on the issues most critical to growing your business.

Peer learning is also an important element of the Multicultural Entrepreneur Program learning experience and the courses will be taught in a collaborative setting that incorporates the real world experiences of the participating business owners. Participants will be placed into small groups and work with their group throughout the program to explore, practice, and implement the knowledge and skills that promote business success.

In addition to the classroom experience, participants will learn to:

Identify and evaluate business opportunities.
Understand and manage the business environment
Analyze financial statements and use them for management decisions
Access financial capital
Lead and grow a business

Hire, develop, and retain their team
Build a targeted sales effort
Contract with the government
Understand international trade opportunities
Construct and align their business operations to grow their business

How the Program works

After the initial session, participants will meet as a group every month and also have group calls on a weekly basis.

Curriculum

Session 1 – Aligning Your Business Growth with Your Values and Purpose

The opening session will orient participants to the Multicultural Entrepreneur Program and its philosophy. We will discuss the outcomes of their business assessment and focus on understanding and aligning their values, passion and purpose with the growth of their business.

Session 2 – Systems For Growth

The second session will focus on how to create systems to track and measure results. Participants will learn the importance of measuring progress, analyzing progress indicators and aligning progress to reach business objectives.

Session 3 – Financial Foundation

Creating a financial foundation action plan is essential for growing one’s business. In this session, participants will review financial statement basics and develop analyses and forecasting methods to plan and monitor their business growth.

Session 4 – Brand Commitment

Branding is associated with 3 C’s: Clarity, Consistency and Constancy. In this session, participants will learn why commitment is also an important factor in building their brand. They will identify what their unique value proposition is, how to differentiate their brand from competitors, and how to promote a consistent image of their brand.

Session 5 – Getting the Right People on Board

Small businesses frequently attribute their success to the quality and dedication of their people. This session’s focus is learning how to develop a loyal winning team by getting the right people on board, making their team part of the plan and creating an ownership culture.

Session 6 – Marketing Channels and Sales Strategies

In this session, participants will learn how to determine their best marketing channels and create a marketing calendar. They will design a unique sales process based on a customer persona that personifies the characteristics of their ideal customer.

Session 7 – Operations and Processes

In this session, participants will develop a real-time quality control system based on efficiency and building a team culture The emphasis will be on operations, including work-flows and logistics, to give insight to the business process, what it can be, and how to bridge the gap.

Session 8 – Access to Capital

This session will review the different types of financing available, discuss the steps to obtain financial capital through each, and help participants understand which funding sources are most appropriate for their businesses.

Business Assessment: The 7 Steps to Profitable Business Growth

The Multicultural Entrepreneur Program offers a powerful set of assessments to provide deep insight into how your organization performs on the 7 fundamental business functions required for growth. These are the functions you must execute well to acquire new customers, grow revenue, and become investment grade. The assessments are designed to provide a cross functional view of your business to accurately determine where your growth efforts are being constrained. Fundamentally the lower your organization scores in a given step the greater the constraint on your growth.

Know Thy Customer – Deep customer intimacy provides the foundation for creating solutions that solve meaningful problems that can be economically justified. Knowledge of customer buying behaviors and barriers to buying are crucial to consummating sales.
Know Thy Competition – A high quality, unbiased and formal understanding of the competitive landscape provides the basis for determining market entry viability, and truly effective market positioning.
Develop Strong, Actionable Segments – A true understanding of market size and the segments that exist within it provides the entrepreneur with the ammunition to create focus and dominate segments.
Articulate a Meaningful, Defensible Value Proposition – A solid value proposition is the cornerstone of market messaging, for setting hooks with customers that inspire them to take next steps through the sales funnel, and for sales/customer dialogue.
Commit to Sales as a Differentiator – Successful execution of a business plan requires as much valuable differentiation as possible. Customer engagement strategies and sales execution must be part of this.
Build Passion and Commitment in the Team – Simply put, inspired teams created inspired results. Over time, in the heat of continuous battle and the overcoming of consistent obstacles team passion and commitment can wane.
Align Everything, Establish a Drumbeat – Rapidly growing, resource constrained organization must manage commitments, aligns its resources and stay focused on the critical success factors.

Fall 2023 Schedule