CLT delivers accelerator masterclass for Ashden Award winners

CLT guided 12 sustainability scale-ups through a one-day accelerator masterclass to help them prepare for commercial growth at Ashden. Ashden Award winners all have good ideas that tend to grow fast, but rapid growth can be hard to manage without the right tools and processes in place to scale-up.

CLT’s Chair Christopher Tchen and Principal Consultant Jeffrey Beyer led the masterclass to help the scale-ups maximise their growth and avoid commercial pitfalls. The session covered four key components.

1. Multiple stakeholder and complex sales situations – Navigating complex sales pathways, managing different customer roles, and influencing different types of customer stakeholder
2. Leadership, Team and Culture in a scale-up – Defining new roles and new expectations and analysing current and future team mix
3. Professionalising processes – Reviewing eight dimensions of commercial readiness and prioritising process development
4. Scale up success and financial disaster – How rapid growth can cause failure, focus on working capital, risks and options.

CLT shared a suite of tools with the participants to help them identify their organisation’s level of commercial readiness, disaggregate their value chain and target key buyers, and identify who they needed to influence to close sales. Other tools helped the scale-ups map out their human resource plan, prioritise needs in their commercial journey, and work through their future cash flow position to make sure the company would remain viable during times of rapid growth.

The masterclass was well-received, with 80% of participants awarding it the highest score of “very useful” and 20% evaluating it as “quite useful”. Feedback from the session was resoundingly positive:

“Really helped frame how to prioritise next steps for scale up.”

“Once again very useful and time-relevant assistance from the ‘Ashden team”