Symplicity Designs Launches Online Training Platform To Help SMEs Grow
MONCTON – Symplicity Designs is setting its aim on a larger market, hoping to help more businesses across North America and beyond with the launch of its online training platform SympliScaling.
Based in Halifax and Moncton, Symplicity Designs is a B Corp that helps companies and organizations improve, innovate, scale and grow through facilitated workshops, consulting services and other offerings.
The company launched SympliScaling in February, after eight months in development. The content is offered by the same team behind Symplicity Designs’ other services.
Sarah Gowan, organizational designer at Symplicity Designs who leads the SympliScaling initiative, said the move is in line with the company’s vision to help organizations everywhere.
“One of the biggest limitations we have in our footprint really is that our warm bodies need to be in the room with clients. We lead them through training and transformation and we’re roughly a team of 30, so we can only help so many companies at a time,” she said.
“As we started to grow, we realize that we are one of the biggest constraints to our own vision…So, we were really just looking at how to help more people without having to be in the room with them.”
The first course available online is called Scale Your Value. The first module is offered for free but the whole course, which is eight hours worth of materials, costs US$599.
“It’s broken up so that they can take it bits at a time, because we know that business owners often don’t have eight-hour chunks to spare in their day, so we want to make sure that people can go through this when they have the time to focus on it,” Gowan said.
With a focus on profitability, she said the course can help everyone from a plumbing business with a team of two to a medium-sized enterprise making up to $20 million in revenue.
“One of the biggest constraints that you see with organizations whether they’re trying to scale or not is profitability. So it’s really going through actually really better understanding their customer,” she said.
“The goal we want is to get people back to the dream they had when they started that business and we know that many SME owners are feeling that their business runs them, and that they don’t run their business. We’re really trying to help flip the needle back for them.”
Symplicity Designs hopes the online offering will allow it to go global. But for now, because the materials offered are only in English, the target is North American SMEs.
While the content is applicable to startups and other organizations, it’s mainly tailored for privately owned SMEs. But over the next two years, Gowan says Symplicity Designs will work on a version for startups as well as a version for the social sector and non-profit organizations.
Two more courses will be launched in April.