Acco Learn for Business

Sometimes businesses grow so fast that there is little time to think about things like sustainable scale-up and recurring revenue generation. There are often many ideas, but how do you know what to pursue and what not to pursue? A Business Model Sprint provides direction in such cases.

Acco Learn for Business (ALfB), a spin-off of the cooperative organization Acco, develops custom online and offline learning materials for the corporate market. Think, for example, of a welder who needs to obtain his annual certification.

‍

In a short period of time, business unit owners Niels Strybos and Erwin Lenaers had established a platform and curriculum, as well as a significant market share, particularly in e-learning. The product was functioning well, customers were satisfied, but scaling the business model proved challenging. MakerLab was asked to assist in bringing focus to the endeavor.

In the Business Model Sprint, we collectively transform ambition into action within one week. First, we map ALfB: who, what, how, and where is it heading? This is the phase where facts are recorded and ambitions are pronounced. For ALfB, these ambitions were: entering a promising new market, operating more efficiently within the current product delivery, and marketing the educational software as a standalone product.

Immediately after, we explored business scenarios, the potential routes ALfB could take to achieve those ambitions, and what impact that would have. This is crucial for making choices between strategies. Niels and Erwin discovered that ALfB's strength lies in the high quality of their didactic consultancy. Something that therefore needed to be central to the company's growth, putting other scenarios-such as marketing the software-lower on the priority list.

From ALfB's consultancy base, we then developed three business models, which we promptly translated into a tangible roadmap. What are the strengths and weaknesses, how do you validate solutions for the weaknesses, and when do you know whether to push forward or pivot? This collectively formed a well-founded strategy for the upcoming months, which could be shared with the management of the parent company, Acco.

‍

We aim to go beyond the advisory report in a Business Model Sprint and collaboratively take the first concrete steps. For ALfB, in addition to the action plan, we've also mapped out the entire workflow, identified areas for improvement, and made suggestions on how they could automate certain processes. This immediately resulted in a template for conducting deep scans for business clients, significantly streamlining this labor-intensive process while ensuring high-quality input.

Thanks to the Business Model Sprint, ALfB got from all kinds of possible ambitions to concrete to-do's in no time. Sometimes you need an outside sounding board to bring speed and focus, and that's exactly what MakerLab does.