200 Entrepreneurs Wanted for our Bootcamp. Hard Work, Tight Deadlines, and the Business Learning of a Lifetime!
200 entrepreneurs bound in a single mission of growth… …6 weeks of business training from the Firepole Marketing team… …and a $130,000 investment, to make it all happen!
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It started with a very personal blog post, about my ambitions and dreams around making a real difference in the world, and my fears about the risks involved in trying to make that happen. I ended the post with a bold statement:
“I want to take a significant amount of our time, resources, and money, and invest it all into providing a transformative business education experience for deserving members of our global entrepreneurial community; people who are set to create something spectacular for themselves, and for the world, but don’t have the critical business knowledge to make it happen, or the resources that it would take to acquire that education.”
I asked if it was a good idea, or if I was crazy to even consider it, and I was completely OVERWHELMED by the incredible support, enthusiasm, and encouragement that I’ve received through comments, tweets, and direct emails. So, despite my fears, I made the commitment that yes, we’re going to do this: a six-week intensive Bootcamp learning experience.
Here’s what you will learn in the Business Ignition Bootcamp:
- The five key elements of every business (that most business people don’t even know about!)
- How to innovate your business to create incredible profit and sustainability
- The most creative innovations and strongest advantages that we have at Firepole Marketing (including stuff I’ve never disclosed publicly before!)
- Examples of really smart businesses, and how you can copy and implement their best ideas
- How to create an offer that will get your audience’s mouths watering
- When to speak to features, and when to speak to benefits (this might surprise you!)
- How to avoid *very* expensive mistakes using a simple tool called the “market dynamics pendulum”
- Where to find proof that your ideas will work, before you spend your first dollar
- How to decide where you should invest your very limited time to get the most important results
Now, there were some tricky issues to figure out; like what we should teach, how we might scalably support our students, and how to make sure everyone is committed and takes the training seriously, even though it’s free. So I reached out to our community for help, and you responded with 200+ blog comments and 150+ pages (!) of survey responses, answering tough questions like “what was the most effective educational experience you’ve had, and what made it effective”, “would you be willing to dedicate some time each week to supporting your fellow students”, “have you seen any really innovative ways of engendering commitment and consistency in a free training program”, and many others. We gathered and sorted through some fantastic ideas around how the training can be best structured to give people the very best chance of understanding and apply what they learn.
How the Learning Will Work
After much deliberation, here are some of the ideas that we’ve decided to implement:
- Flipped classroom. We’re going to put a lot of effort into creating high quality pre-recorded video content for the lessons, and then focusing the “live time” on showcasing student work, and answering questions.
- Homework. Yes, there will be homework – real work that every student will be expected to complete.
- Tight deadlines. This isn’t going to be one of those “sign up and follow along if you feel like it” – it will be more along the lines of “watch the lessons and complete all of the milestones on time, or give up your spot”. Now, of course we aren’t looking to create crazy amounts of stress, and we’ll make sure the timelines and workloads will be reasonable – but there will be deadlines that people will be expected to stick to.
- Learning styles assessments. We’re going to spend a bunch of money on each and every student to allow everyone to complete a detailed learning styles assessment, to give us a better picture of how each student will learn, and how we can best support them.
- Peer support. There will be a lot of opportunities to both give and receive support from peers within the program, and giving that support will be a required part of the learning.
The Cost of the Bootcamp (Yes, It’s Free!)
So first of all, yes, it’s going to be free. Not free + shipping, not free + continuity, and not free + up-sells. Just free. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be cheap, because doing this is actually going to cost us a huge chunk of cash. I’m estimating that between our time, the technology and the video equipment, the learning styles assessments, and the foregone revenue, it’ll add up to almost $130,000. $130,000. No joke. And we’re happy to foot the bill, but if we’re spending that kind of money, we want to be sure that each and every person in the Bootcamp will have a *phenomenal* learning experience. Which means that we’re only accepting 200 people into the Bootcamp, and it will be by application, and we’ll be looking for those who are truly committed.
So how can you apply for a spot in the Bootcamp?
The first step is to fill out the application form that you’ll find at the top (or bottom) of this page. Then you’ll be asked to confirm that you’re really committed to doing the work, supporting your fellow students, and making a real difference for yourself, and for the world. Then you’ll get to the application form, and this isn’t a standard application form. We’ll ask you questions about your accomplishments, about your contributions to others, and about how you’ve handled difficult situations in the past. You’ll want to put some real thought into these questions, because we’re going to carefully review your answers in selecting our students.
The deadline to apply is 11:59pm Eastern on Tuesday, May 28th.
Then we’ll spend a week reviewing applications, and then we’ll get rolling – the Bootcamp will kick off the following week! So that’s it – if you’ve got questions, check our Questions and Answers page, or shoot us an email. And otherwise, go ahead and apply!
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