Whether you’re starting up or scaling up, a strong personal and professional brand is critical for success. This seminar is aimed at providing business owners with insights to help define, develop, market and manage both themselves and their brand.

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Is your website increasing your close rate or is it just a fancy brochure?
A website is arguably your most important sales and marketing asset. It works around the clock—nights, weekends, and holidays. But many websites don't pull their weight in the sales process. From lead generation to conversion, learn how your website can be your most powerful sales enablement tool. When built with revenue-generation as the primary goal, you won’t need to hire a huge sales team right away—you can let your website do the heavy lifting. Join 25-year industry veteran, Kitty Hart, for fresh takes on how to build a powerful, sales-focused website that drives growth for your business.

Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.

The long term success of purpose-driven organizations hinges on their ability to efficiently grow their audience, but they are also the least likely to have access to the expert marketing support that can make that happen. 

We’ll talk through the MVPs of your essential marketing assets to get started and how to use them to create something actionable. 

- Building your marketing personas 

- Mapping your buyers journey 

- Identifying your key messages 

- Planning actual campaigns and content 

This workshop teaches a new approach to marketing that will leave you feeling confident in your strategy and ready to dive in and execute!

Are you trying to grow a social enterprise, or thinking about launching a new venture? Hear from leaders in the Twin Cities ecosystem of mission-driven businesses, discussing strategies for success. Also, meet social entrepreneurs and shop with purpose at the virtual Social Enterprise Showcase marketplace, featuring dozens of local vendors and changemakers.

You’re ready to grow. What’s holding you back? With the right data, tech, and processes delivered by an all-on-one sales & marketing system, you can supercharge your growth. Make the right investment the first time and rest assured that you won’t have to scrap and rebuild your systems as you reach maturity.

In this session, Denamico will show you how you can build a website, marketing, sales, and customer service system that scales alongside your business.

Join us for a humor-filled chat about hopes, dreams and sunk costs in an age of crushing dystopia — and learn how our VR dev shop shifted focus to stay focused. After we've bashed on 2020 for a bit, we'll wax poetic on the wonderful future that awaits — and share a few strategies for getting there.

We’re often lumped into two categories: creative or technical. But we’re here to prove that wrong. With the combination of art and tech, new categories are possible! From making high-quality media accessible to all to helping creatives focus on the essential parts of their roles, we’ll use real examples of how creativity + tech play together at soona. We’ll walk through what’s possible with the combination of these two arts and give you tips on how to incorporate them into your work.

Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.

65% of people are visual learners, and only 17% are data literate. Because graphics are an important method of showing complex systems - visuals (including data visualization, infographics, and visual storytelling) can be a useful tool to help audiences relate to and connect with ever-growing mountains of data. 

This presentation will walk participants through a case study showing how better data visualization of complex value chains can help an organization connect with customers, partners, and funders. When everyone can see the benefits of your product, service, or partnership, selling it is as easy as a pie chart.

As a business leader, your job is to make tough decisions quickly and accurately. How can you make better, faster, more informed decisions to stay ahead of the competition? By aligning real-time data, scalable technology, and efficient processes.

In this session, we'll discuss the importance of investing in better technology, faster digital alignment, and more informed processes so that you can stay one step ahead of your competitors.

"Experience Money Differently." will be a founder presentation followed by a panel event featuring four diverse individuals from our company. This event will focus on storytelling and sharing experiences around money. Money is generally seen as taboo — we don’t talk about it at all, and are never taught about money management in school. This leaves us feeling like other people don’t go through the same things we do when it comes to money, when in reality we as a community share a lot of similarities when it comes to our experiences with money. We’ll talk about these experiences, as well as ways we can all go about practicing getting rich. Changing our financial situations comes form relating to one another and practicing for the real world, not just “learning” financial literacy.

Join us in the tech.mn Live Podcast Booth channel to see some of Minnesota's best podcasters interviewing each other. Moderator, Alex Skjong, will be matching up show hosts to talk all things Minnesota, podcasting, business, and more.

We’re all trying to stay afloat during the COVID-19. Why not swap some stories and learn from each others’ experiences while we’re in the same boat? Three panelists from very different industries will share honest accounts of creative problem solving, a misstep or two, and surprising discoveries that will inspire you to find and capitalize on the silver linings of the COVID-19 crisis.

Paving a Strategic ROADMAP™ to Success: The challenge of developing a simple, clear and effective business strategy. There is always more than one way to a destination.  Choosing the right strategic path for your business is a challenge. Strategic ROADMAP addresses the seven critical questions your strategies need to answer – in a simple, logical and memorable structure. The questions apply at the company, business unit or project level.  Equally they can be framed for core or disruptive business growth. This talk will explain developing your strategy using the Strategic ROADMAP.  It will discuss each of the 7 critical questions and provide a clear example using one of the most well-known, and maybe the only, success stories in the U.S. commercial airline business – Southwest Airlines.

The ILT Academy delivers extensive educational experiences to cultivate problem solvers, innovators, and entrepreneurs. We empower problem solvers and innovators to rethink and redesign problems, solutions, customers, and context. We equip entrepreneurs with the skills needed to commercialize ideas, develop successful ventures, and create high-growth businesses.

Learn how career, top-level executive assistants integrate into their principal's lives to free up their time and increase their productivity.

Have you ever had an idea to strengthen your community? Do you have a desire to use your skills or knowledge to solve critical social problems? Code Switch is for you. We are looking for techies AND non-techies — from developers to entrepreneurs, artists, educators, business professionals, concerned citizens, everyday people and more!  We believe everyone has a role to play in improving our communities, and Code Switch provides that opportunity. Join us and leverage your knowledge and skills to reduce the gaps that exist in Minnesota. 

Code Switch is in its fifth year as a civic hackathon where community members connect to co-create solutions that disrupt inequity. This year, our virtual hackathon will kick off on September 12, the National Day of Civic Hacking. Participants will then have one month to work on projects in teams before our final celebration and sharing of projects in late October.

Register Here!

Minnesota Innovates welcomes the Founders of five companies as they share insights and their experiences funding the growth of nationally and internationally successful companies.

Join us in the tech.mn Live Podcast Booth channel to see some of Minnesota's best podcasters interviewing each other. Moderator, Alex Skjong, will be matching up show hosts to talk all things Minnesota, podcasting, business, and more.

Making money with a content-driven site is possible. Here's how I did it.

Celebrating Minority Owned Businesses in Minnesota

Victor Hugo, the renowned French writer, famously said: "There Is one thing stronger than all the armies In the world, and that Is an Idea whose time has come.”  

This is a rapid fire, engaging session to bring intellectual property (IP) principles out of the legal stratosphere down to the level of the fired up entrepreneur looking to blaze a trail into the future.

We'll explore at least 5 insider secrets about IP law that can fuel greater enthusiasm of your investors, team members, and customers as you build lasting businesses with greater differentiation, profit margins, and exit potential.

Learn how patents actually do encourage innovation from you and your team.

Learn how the classic boy-meets-girl romance can improve your understanding of patent law.

Learn how to go from patent filing to patenthood in 6 months or less.

These and other insights will leave you with a new sense of possibility for leveraging IP to supercharge your business results.

Whether targeting impact investments or growing new revenue streams, organizations need to think differently about partnerships, finances, and change. It can be difficult for mission-driven leaders to know where to start. 

Join this workshop as experts from 20 Degrees, provide a systematized approach to growing revenue and acquiring new impact capital. The team from 20 Degrees helps nonprofits and social enterprises add complementary revenue streams to their existing income, enabling organizations to test holistic revenue models and bring more predictability to income. 

Together we will walk through the key steps to unlocking how an organization can blend charitable and non-charitable dollars into one cohesive approach. Walk away with tangible ideas that can ensure that your mission is driving the budget, not the other way around.

As a startup business owner, you don't want to leave anything on the table. Did you know that 99.999996% of what our brains process every moment is unconscious? Learn how to raise awareness of your biases and replace them to act in alignment with your mission and values while you build your business. 

This session provides a definition of unconscious bias, a quick dive into how to understand it, a framework for how to address it, and tools to help you move forward with actions and activities to be more successful. 

This session will help open your eyes and open your mind.

Values aren't an add-on. Rather, they're core to everything your business does. Make sure your company represents what you want it to. Start with a strategic approach, understanding to elevate values in every part of a company. We'll look at how this framework applies for early stage ventures, and dig into visuals and worksheets to help you apply the takeaways for companies of any size.

Rapidly advancing technologies, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, and algorithmic decision-making have proven to be a force for good. These technologies can also amplify forms of inequality, discrimination, and bias.  

This conversation will focus on opportunities for more digital inclusion through Data Policy and opportunities via immersive Virtual Reality experiences.

We will discuss creating a more inclusive narrative that addresses racial and social inequalities which bends into the metaverse thus improving AI & The Black Experience.

Following this session join the speaker(s) in the Community Lounge for a 15 minute Q&A.

Are you trying to move your organization, or even your community, out of the status quo? Are you looking for effective ways to disrupt while keeping your credibility and social capital? If yes, join us for practical strategies on how to successfully move toward more innovation and more modernization. That is, how to disrupt without being disruptive.

Are you building a business as a force for good? One that balances purpose and profit? B Corps are driving a global movement of business as a force for good. Join us for a panel discussion with three Minnesota B Corp founders and hear about their journeys becoming B Corps, benefits and challenges, and their recommendations for businesses considering B Corp certification.

Join us in the tech.mn Live Podcast Booth channel to see some of Minnesota's best podcasters interviewing each other. Moderator, Alex Skjong, will be matching up show hosts to talk all things Minnesota, podcasting, business, and more.

Have your beer and eat it too. Find out about food upcycling and how it helps food & beverage manufacturers can eliminate food waste and feed the world.

Understanding Bitcoin, debunking "blockchain" hype, and exploring the separation of money and state. No technical experience required.

Learn about how we leverage our positions as students to make investment decisions and add value for our portfolio companies, as well as how we navigate the modern VC world.