Hello all and welcome back! After going through the DiscoveReads book festival at the Hold (and more specifically, Amanda's workshop) to prepare myself mentally for the next big thing, that big thing is finally here, one week after the book festival - the Business Start-up Bootcamp!
So, the June 2025 Bootcamp is a business start-up programme that is run by the Enterprise and Entrepreneurship team at the University of Suffolk. It is set to take place over 12 sessions in the months of May, June and July, with the programme culminating with the grand finale on the 8th of July, where participants will have the chance to pitch for up to £10,000 in funding.
The event takes place on the University Campus, and if you are not familiar with Ipswich (or even the United Kingdom), I am going to show you a picture of the iconic University of Suffolk buildings, located along the waterfront (and it really is stunning!):
Day 1: Bootcamp Beginnings
Ah. Let's start off by saying that I was already in the Atrium long before the Bootcamp kicked off at 4:30pm, and as is typical of me arriving early to events, the Bootcamp began with silence. A silence that was broken apart on various occasions by different comings and goings around the glasshouse.
And then... everything started coming to light as soon as the doors began to swing open. The delicious refreshments. The random chatter. The streams of people coming in and being greeted. And the action then really kicked off when the clock ticked over to 4:30pm.
Once the crowd settled down into their seats, the bootcamp was well underway, starting off with a success story from a previous bootacmper to set up a disability inclusion social enterprise. They described the experience on the Bootcamp as being highly positive, in that they were able to get lots of information and advice that allowed her to access support and mentorship from the Start, Build, Grow programme, a programme that led to further successes for her, as they managed to become one of 200 winners of grant funding from Innovate UK to further develop her business.
Then we had to introduce ourselves and our business ideas, and needless to say, the idea of mine to work on fantasy maps as a business idea has attracted widespread applause from across the ideas room. Other participants had plans to start up a social enterprise to spread awareness around coercive control in relationships and to support those experiencing domestic abuse, another wanted to create a business that focuses on scientifically-proven mindfulness exercises, and a masters student who wanted to start up a cyber security business after spending two years working for IT companies in India.
With the initial introductions out of the way, it was time to present a current business owner running a Suffolk-based marketing firm and an ex-head of Marketing at the University. They came along on to the event to talk about his business journey, a journey that spanned small consultants, giants that turned over £107m, as well as a portfolio that took them all over the world, running consultancy campaigns for big organisations in Australia, including Woolworths, and finishing on the present day with their organisation, a business that turned over 60% year-on-year and managed to employ seven staff.
With the presentations out of the way and some more random chatter later, we eventually moved to the larger lecture space next door, preparing for the upcoming ice breaker activities. I must say that the following talk about the beginnings started off shall I say, quite interestingly... fighting for a living, getting rejected from an applied science course, and then going on to run a security company and even being a headteacher at a school.
Then he went on to talk about his journey towards the creation of an outdoor company - firstly the initial challenges of having to find someone who could entertain his idea, and then everything changed when Thetford Town Council offered to sponsor a paddle board area on the Little Ouse. Fortunes then turned even more in his favour, when the presenter was given the chance to go on a year long business start-up bootcamp course at Cambridge University - the bootcamp was a success for him, and he had a chance to get together a team of three confidants to run the organisation's day-to-day tasks, in addition to acquiring an eight-acre plot of land to run the business from. Last but not least, the quote that came from one of the Scout Association colleagues about the business really made me chuckle!
With the initial talk out of the way, it was time to get to the ice breaker activity - the main highlight of the day's events. Up first was the human knot challenge, where we had to split into two groups and get round into circles - up first, we had to use our left hands to hold on to each other, followed by our right hands, before reaching the ultimate challenge, where we had to get ourselves untied and into a straight line without letting go of the other person's hand - at one point our group was so stuck that we had to get the other team to act as consultants to get ourselves back on track and complete the challenge.
Once that challenge was over, our next task was to play a charade game, where we were given pieces of paper with famous names and we had to guess what these persons did, without mentioning the person directly to the other pair. For this exercise, I was given the Mark Zuckerberg card, and I happened to later be paired up with someone who had Donald Trump on her card. It started out hard, but I began to immerse more into the challenge as it was progressing on.
The third activity that we got around to was the Chinese whispers; the two most common themes that the participants ended up whispering with one another were "I love touching and tasting", as well as the related phrase of having mojitos at 8am - who gets to have a mojito early in the morning nowadays?
Whispering out of the way, and it was time to get back into two teams for the final activity, where we had to pick up different cards that were numbered from 1 to 20, until we found the number 1 - before getting the numbers into ascending order. With the other team finishing the exercise a lot faster, it just goes to show that served as a reminder that we shouldn't overcomplicate things - one line is sometimes better than splitting things into two parts!
With Paul's ice breaker sessions complete, we started to wind down the days' activities, and I began to head home, the beautiful sunset mixed in with dark clouds setting a scene of melancholy in the house as soon as I got home.
Day 2: The Ideation Session That Never Happened
Ah yes, this is where the Bootcamp programme begins to turn and twist around each corner. I was originally going to be involved in the ideation session, however I was snared up by a job interview for a zero-hours role at the nearby Archives (run-of-the-mill questions around prioritisation, manual handling and family history were flying around the interview room) so unfortunately, I don't have anything to bring to you with regards to the session that happened on the 3rd of June.
Oh well.
Day 3: The Business Planning Workshop
With the job interview out of the way, it was back to the normal schedule of Bootcamp events, with the next event being the business planning workshop. So, as soon as I arrived into the Atrium building, the first thing I noticed there was a change of location - we were going to be based upstairs due to an ICAEW seminar that was happening in the usual sweet spot downstairs.
Once the session was underway, it wasn't long before the first order of tasks came along, where we had to discuss common challenges and misconceptions that were associated with starting businesses. In our group, we talked about a myriad of challenges. Cash flow. Trauma from family conflicts. Wrong target audience.
But there were also plenty of misconceptions that were being floated around in our group - the obvious one being that you could make millions off of starting a business, along with the myth that you will always have a support network there to help you with your business every step of the way.
Other participants had incredible stories of challenges they faced starting up their businesses, such as the mindfulness participant who was looking to get in a cardiovascular expert based in Utah that had caused controversy for his materials on big pharma (ouch!), along with a similar scenario where another participant had explained someone gaining thousands of followers on their social media platforms, hoping that the exposure would build their business reputation upwards, only to have that hard work scuppered by toxic comments.
With the exercise over, it wasn't long before next task came along - the good old activity where we had to figure out the order behind producing a marketing plan. The exercise turned out to be a lot more of a doddle compared to when I first did it in June 2023, but as before, her description of each group having some "rogue" pieces of paper when talking about budgets and TikTok promotion really did make me laugh, especially towards the end of the activity.
The laughter and liveliness fizzled out not long afterwards, and it was back to lecturing mode for a bit, firstly going through the basics of a marketing plan and the need to create targets that are measurable and actionable, followed by the Product, Price, Place and Promotion framework - although sadly, there will be no activity revolving around that this time round. At least some participants managed to chime in the idea of a sauna equivalent for networking with other people as a compromise.
After getting to have a bit of a random chat on the lunch break at 11am, there was some more lecturing, as we would then go on to spend some time going through the business frameworks, starting off with the market positioning map (which can be used for other things besides price and quality!), followed by market segmentation tactics, then PESTLE/PESTEL - which describe, among other things, how legal, political, environmental and economical issues that affect the business idea, followed by the SWOT framework (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats).
The market segmentation and positioning talk led on to the next task, which was to describe our own customer personas. For this task, I decided to go with a persona of someone who has an ordinary day job and comes out to a games shop to play a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. That persona worked out well, but I wished that I had also created a persona that revolved around a novelist who was sitting in a coffee bar, waiting to send an email out about creating a story that revolved around fantasy worlds.
Anyways, here are the actual contents of my persona:
With the persona activity over, it was time to get to the lunch break, and once I had taken 20 minutes of my precious time to tuck in to the lunch that I had brought in, I went out of the seminar room for a little bit to spend some time admiring this realistic-looking display of rising and falling stock exchange indices - stock markets are a very important component of one of my modern fantasy worlds, and so it was incredible to see something that looks strangely familiar to me right here on the University campus.
Lunch break over, we all returned to the seminar room, and it was time to get to the most revolutionary business planning toolkit that you can find out there - the Business Model Canvas.
Now here is where the scheduling of the activity gets a little bit interesting - when I attended the Bootcamp in June 2023, the Business Model Canvas was scheduled before the marketing sessions as the first session on the programme following the launch event, but here, the business and marketing plan materials acted as a build-up to the Business Model Canvas.
For me, the Business Model Canvas was a lot more of a formality than a chore in comparison to doing it in previous events, as I already had something to go off with regards to my business idea, however I had made a few minor changes to accommodate the changing fantasy map landscape. In particular, after previously finding out that general craft fairs are not going to work, I have decided to change things around a bit to focus more on forums where fantasy gamers do like to hang out in.
But just like my previous attempts at creating a business model canvas, I've managed to come up with some really interesting branches from the original plan - one of the participants said that fantasy story telling is a really useful tool for struggling children, and that I should try pushing out my idea in a wide range of educational settings! That might be feasible, if I can get an enhanced DBS check to make that happen...
But anyways, here is an illustration of the business model canvas that I created during the current bootcamp, in comparison to the business model canvas that I created in June 2023:
The activity eventually came to an end, and it was time for the participants to discuss their business model canvasses. Now I am not going to bore you this time with going through the full details of every other person's business model canvasses, so let's just say that while everyone had a diverse range of ideas in terms of key partners, activities and value propositions, there was also a recurring theme in terms of customer partnerships, communication channels and resources - marketing costs, computer systems and wages being common key resources.
With everyone having had the opportunity to explain their business model canvasses, it wasn't long before the session came to an end, and it was time to leave campus, but instead of heading straight home like I usually would, I decided to take an interesting detour, and head to the cinema screening of "The Salt Path". It was a very poignant story around losing livelihoods and suffering with rare conditions, but it was also a very powerful story around resilience, managing to walk the South West Coast Path all the way to Land's End, at one point only having less than £2 in their bank account, and eventually managing to sort their lives out after that once-in-a-lifetime experience, getting jobs in sustainable agriculture.
Conclusions from days 1 to 3
After having been through the first three days of the bootcamp, I have to say that the first two sessions after the launch event are an improvement on the overall organisation of bootcamp content in general (but don't get me wrong, I still enjoyed the old format). While I can't give any comments about the ideation session itself as I was unable to attend that session (and so I have to accept the assumption that the session on ideation was thoughtful and engaging), I have to say that the flow from ideation to business planning actually worked out quite nicely - start out with an idea and validate it, target your audience and then create the ideal one-pager.
But the biggest thing about the Bootcamp is that the environment is very lively, interactive and engaging, with participants asking questions around how the different concepts that are being taught apply to their business ideas, such as the question around marketing metrics that was asked before the first task around misconceptions and challenges. Not to mention that there were still some very engaging elements in the activities that I recognised from the old bootcamp format, most notably the activity around the "rogue" pieces of paper - that was loads of fun!
With that, I hope you have enjoyed this introduction to the 2025 start-up bootcamp series. We will be diving into the world of social enterprises and online marketing platforms in days 4 and 5, and so I am definitely looking forward to sharing with you the dynamics of those sessions.
And as always, do let me know if there is anything in these diagrams that I could improve.
Signing off with much love,
Jakub
This post has since been edited to address privacy concerns raised by the University on the 19th of June 2025.
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