When I was chosen to be in Goldman Sachs's first Philadelphia cohort of their 10,000 Small Businesses Program I was cynical about the peer learning component. I figured this was just something to which I had to pay lip service. Sure, I can collaborate with the best of them; I can be a team player, but frankly, I was just interested in building my business. What I really needed was the secret sauce: the formula to take my company from the leader in its niche to a replicable business model which I could franchise. You probably already know the punch line: What I learned was that the secret sauce is the peer learning.
While a few of us were pretty adept at networking--and guess what--those were the people who owned the companies that seemed to be doing really well--most of us were slogging through our day to day tasks. We were doing our skill sets really well, but we were not making time to make connections. Like so many small business owners, we were hoeing our own rows, some of us down in trenches so deep that we could not see who was laboring next to us. READ MORE
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