Introduction
Hello and a very warm, squirrely welcome to the Red Squirrel taster sessions. We are looking forward to meeting you and working with you on your business strategy and story.
First of all – a quick ask – look behind you and check your tail. Can you see it yet? No? Well only three sessions to go until you might!
Squirrels and business, really?
So, why all this talk of squirrels and how does it relate to business? Red Squirrel is a metaphor that we (StrategyStory) use to describe rural and creative businesses, i.e. you.
Our Red Squirrel business development programme stems from academic research and practical experience with businesses. A key aim of the programme is to guide you through your strategy and story development in a way that is bespoke to your distinctive strengths and challenges.
Structure and time commitment
You are about to embark on three taster sessions from the overall Red Squirrel programme.
We will introduce you to the concept and provide you with some tools and frameworks to focus your Strategy and Story. The three sessions are all linked and follow an order so it is important that you can attend all three to get as much from the programme as possible.
In between sessions we will leave you with homework exercises and additional material, but how much time you spend on this is really down to how much you feel able to commit to. We won’t test you! (Well, not too much).
Background material
To help you prepare for session one, we have provided you with two pieces of content that should take 15 – 20 mins to digest.
- Discussion paper
Our discussion paper that will give you a deeper insight into the concept and which we hope will spark some lively conversation in the session.
The paper is available here: Red Squirrel discussion paper
2. Introductory video
We also have a brief video to introduce the Red Squirrel concept where you will meet Professor Donald MacLean who is the originator of the idea:
We hope you enjoy, and we look forward to meeting you in Session 1! If you have any questions in the meantime please just drop us an email: redsquirrel@strategystory.co.uk
All the very best,
Donald and Kate