Escalate Group committed to Small Business

Due to Covid-19, and currently, the race riots, the most challenging hit sector in the global economy is the Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Leveraging the dramatic success of the ExO World Digital Summit, HealRWorld united with ExO World created ExO World: Small Business Summit to help small companies surviving 2020 and creating a thriving future.  

Society is being transformed today by the major forces of COVID-19, technological advancements, and environmental and social challenges. Many organizations are ill-prepared to address these issues. Society is ill-prepared to adapt. 

Empowering Small Business

Escalate Group cooperated with the 5000-strong OpenExO Global Transformation Ecosystem, X Prize Foundation, Abundance360, Vortex, HighVibe, Rokk3r, Fastrack Institute, ExO Speakers and Fluid Chains. Besides, the summit’s objective was to use this moment to inspire and empower global small businesses to transform the world with new disruptive technology and strategies that focus on serving and positively impacting their communities and beyond. 

This July 14, 2020, Escalate Group co-founders Olga Calvache and Cesar Castro joined a selected group of speakers at the ExO World: Small Business Summit Online. Among the other featured speakers, we found Paul Polman, Salim Ismail, Michele Bongiovanni, Leslie Short, John Denton, Matthew Gamser, Anakha Coman, John Mackey, and Andrew Yang.  

“Amazing… I have met amazing people and have a number of follow up conversations across the globe” Nicole Dreiske (ExO World Speaker – Screen Smart.) 

The interactive workshop facilitated by Escalate Group partners, guided the participants to identify, adapt, and create new business opportunities coming out from disruption.  Escalate Group’s recommendations to face the adversity and gain an advantage, relying on proven practices trusted by leading organizations around the world, helped small business to learn how to leverage the crises to come out ahead stronger. 

“Escalate Group workshop was an awesome hands-on experience to re-imaging my organization,” said Felicia Santos, Philippine business owner in New York.  

The Volcano Summit Experience

It was a fantastic experience for Escalate Group to have participated as guest speakers in the online Volcano Summit this past June 13th.

The promise of the event was highly enticing when we heard this experience was going to be an online oasis to explore the future of innovation in our ever-changing world. And the outcome honored it.

Amid a pandemic lockdown and walking around this online encounter, we were able to learn from videos of previous editions of this yearly Guatemala-held event. We were astonished by the beauty of the setting and the energy imprinted by its leaders advocating innovation and educating a community thirsting for the latest trends in technology.

This year they could not fall short with the expectations of its audience. With limited time, they created a curated line up of activities to keep its community engaged with their promise.

The event included speakers, networking, meetups, workshops, expo booths, and breakout discussions. Those interested in a more personalized experience, engaged using a headset in an immersive VR encounter.

In our speeches, Escalate Group shared our customer-focused approach to innovation view and touched upon the topic of the opportunities that blockchain technology brings to the entrepreneurial world.

We are humbled and honored to have contributed to the success of this event, which attracted more than 1,500 participants from 30 countries on that Saturday morning.

Kudos to Emilio Eva, Director of Volcano Summit, and his team. They were able to make the Volcano Summit alive again this year, keeping faithful to its game-changer community and demonstrating that space and time are of no importance when bringing together investors, sponsors, businesses, and entrepreneurs!

How to take an established mid-market company and supercharge it to exponential growth?

The combined effect of new exponential technologies is changing the world faster than before. Peter Diamandis’s 6Ds (Digitization, Deception, Disruption, Demonetization, Dematerialization, and Democratization) provide the best ideas on the “how” this is happening.

There is a clear need for transformation and re-inventing our organizations. As coined by David Rose “Any company designed for success in the 20th century is doomed to failure on the 21st”

Mid-market companies’ leaders should constantly ask two questions that can help them win in today’s competitive and disruptive world: 1) How do I always create new customer value? Also, 2) How do I always optimize and speed up the processes of my organization?

However, that’s not enough to keep up with today’s Fourth Industrial Revolution. The ExO attributes from Exponential Organizations by @SalimIsmail, are essential to connect not only Corporates and Unicorns but also mid-market companies to the abundance of opportunities in the new digital world and to help these organizations to manage that abundance.

The Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) is the base of any Exponential Organization, and it serves as a guiding principle when critical decisions need to be made.

From our experience working with founders, CEOs and leadership teams in the mid-market segment, the MTP helps to identify priorities. Depending on the industry, geography and those priorities, the ExO attributes to implement varies for each organization, we have found the following as core attributes for several mid-market companies:

–         Developing a Community that interacts with the core team of the organization via social media and mobile apps to for example get product feedback and find contractors and experts.

–         Engagement to connect customers and their ecosystem to create network effects and feedback loops with extraordinary reach and a positive impact on the business and the participants.

–         Real-time Dashboards to track and monitor data from critical processes, teams OKRs (Objective and Key Results) as well as from for example of a proprietary mobile app.

–         Establish a culture of Experimentation, growth hacking and constant iteration through their teams. A culture where people is willing to fail, and pivot as needed with constant product iteration and LEAN approach.

Our involvement within the ExO ecosystem has shown that transforming an existing mid-market company into an Exponential Organization is doable but requires three things:

1.      A company culture that can quickly adapt to rapid and often radical change.

2.      A visionary leader who has the full support of the board and senior management.

3.      A group of ambitious and motivated people ready to transform and scale the organization.

We have seen lots of companies passively being disrupted; people don’t see this coming. At Escalate Group, we embed ExO principles into pre-existing mid-market organizations—to help them to explode their performance.