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Growth Curve is a short intensive programme to support business leaders by providing university-led masterclasses that will give you insights that help you strengthen your leadership skills, stabilise your business in the current challenging environment and set your organisation on track for sustainable long-term growth.

Cranfield's Masterclass Series is informed by our 30-year heritage of running Business Growth Programmes and working with small and medium sized entrepreneurial ventures. Our academic led content will deliver up to date applied entrepreneurial thinking across the critical business areas to enable you to critically assess your business and to directly put in place the learning going forward.

Split over two days there are four online masterclasses each designed to be around 1.5 hours in length, with time for peer group interaction and networking in between, all supported by a self-assessed Cranfield developed workbook examining our “10 Steps to Profitable Business Growth”.

Dates: Thursday 13 March and Thursday 27 March 2025
Location: Online
Times: 9.00am-2.00pm

What you will learn

This programme is split across four masterclasses spread over two mornings and will cover the following content:

Day 1 – Economics and Finance

After an initial introduction to your peers and overview of the 10 Steps to Profitable Growth workbook you will undertake two masterclasses:

Masterclass 1 – Economic Outlook
This masterclass will provide an understanding of the prevailing micro and macro-economic trends, outlining what that means for businesses and will focus particularly on the impact for SME's outlining the opportunities and threats that currently exist and the outlook ahead over the coming months and years.

Masterclass 2 – Finance – Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity but cash is king!
Truly understanding the numbers which underpin the revenue drivers and cost levers is vital to develop a sustainable competitive advantage and this masterclass will examine why focussing simply on increasing turnover can actually be damaging to the growth of the business in the long term.

Day 2 – Marketing and People

Following an initial peer group session where participants share the key challenges that they are facing you will complete the final two masterclasses:

Masterclass 3 – Marketing
This masterclass will focus on developing a strategic approach to marketing with a particular emphasis on identifying, reaching and developing a relationship with your most desirable customers and reviewing scalable ways to attract and retain the ones you want to keep.

Masterclass 4 – People
The final masterclass looks at ways in which SMEs can build a high-performance team to enable business owners to develop their own role, free up time and enable them to work on the business rather than in it. Currently, one of the most common issues SMEs outline is the difficulty in finding and attracting the key talent they need so this masterclass will look at some of the key building blocks that need to be put in place to ensure businesses are able to get the human capital they need to underpin their growth ambitions.

Each session is designed to be highly interactive, so participants are requested to come prepared with any questions they might have, or issues that they would like insight on, and to raise and discuss these with our academics during the delivery of the course and beyond.

Who should attend

This programme is designed for business owners or senior managers with the ability to put in place change and who are looking to refresh their knowledge across key business areas and engage with a leading applied business school.

We welcome applications from businesses of all sizes, but the focus is on SMEs with 5 to 250 staff.

Next steps