Pre-Recruit and Train Programme - Meet Babbasa

Nathan and his team of five key members of staff deliver leadership training in the outdoors, building on skills which can be transferred in to the workplace.

The support they have received from the ERDF-funded Enterprising West of England programme in 2018 has been invaluable, which will continue to help them grow their business and help others to succeed too.

Watch the video case study:
 

 Filmed at Paulton House, Midsomer Norton.

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So I'm Nathan fuller and I'm from Challenge Outdoor Leadership. We’re a social enterprise that works with organisations to do leadership training with them. We take people from these organisations into the outdoors and develop those strong leadership skills.

We use the outdoors because we find that it's a really good environment to create skills, either in a pressurised situation or a less pressurised situation, so that when people come back into the workplace they're able to replicate those skills no matter what the situation. 

We have a team of around about five core staff at the minute and we supplement those with contractors that we would bring in for different courses, We got in touch with Core Ventures through looking on the internet really, looking for support. We were pretty Startup at that stage -  we had an idea and a bit of an understanding of what we wanted to do, but really no specific business knowledge and Core Ventures were able to give us advice. Firstly they offer training courses, from workshops on strategy, bookkeeping, digital marketing, website design, social media - the list is endless. One of the most beneficial things about those workshops was speaking to other people who were in the same situation and understanding how they had overcome any issues that they'd had and how they were looking to grow their businesses. That really helped us to understand that with some of the frustrations that we had that we weren't alone.

Cool Ventures and ERDF support us a lot around our marketing. We had this idea but we weren't sure how to convert that into something that people would resonate with and would understand, so that was a big piece of work for us - how to create our digital marketing so that we could show we were subject matter experts really. We had access to experts, from people who were financial directors and accountants, to digital marketeers, to strategists, management consultants - anything really that we needed, there was somebody there who had that knowledge, or if there wasn't, there was people there who knew somebody that did that they could put us in touch with. 

That was hugely beneficial to us - it's like having a board of directors there who've had years and years of experience and as this partnership is free it really helped us to gain that knowledge of people who've been there and done that.  The support that we've received from the ERDF and Cool Ventures has been invaluable to us - it's really helped us grow our organisation much quicker than we would have been able to. Our goal now is to continue to grow, to continue to become more recognised within the leadership field and also in the South West. To anybody starting a business I'd really recommend to get a great team of people around you - that could be people you already know, but I’d also recommend to anybody to contact the ERDF or to find out about their programs because you get access to these amazing people who've had this experience that you wouldn't normally have, so yeah look for all the support that's out there really.