Better Business: An Accelerator AKA Strive Advanced (online)
Got your business up and running but struggling to unlock the next level? Better Business is here to help founders striving to level-up.
Better Business is a six-week advanced Peer-to-Peer (P2P) project in which participants join pods of similar businesses to tackle three of the most common blockers to small and micro enterprise growth.
- Finessing Your Funnel
- Maximising Your Marketing
- Scaling Your Systems
As we tackle each growth blocker, you’ll develop new skills and insights as you work in pods to review peers’ businesses, before going on to create your own actionable development plans.
Develop New Skills Together
At Better Business, we split our workshop time between accelerated skills development and sharing insights with our peers. Our workshops are not webinars; they are active live sessions.
As we dive into areas that hold back small businesses, we focus on practical takeaways and approaches you can start using in your business immediately.
Pod Challenges & Insight Exchanges
In our three pod challenges, you’ll learn by analysing other businesses and get a wealth of insight by having others look at an aspect of your business.
In each challenge, you’ll be given guided activities to explore, experience, review and provide supportive recommendations. Working in pods ensures you always offer reviews in teams and benefit from multiple perspectives on your own business.
Practical Development Plans
It’s time to turn skills, and insights, into actionable plans that happen. At Better Business, you’re invited to create three specific development plans utilising our resources and dedicated one-to-one sessions with our advisers.
Broader Peer Network & Insight Exchanges
Pods are great. Broad networks are great too.
You’ll meet businesses outside your pod through short breakouts, longer insight exchanges, and our ongoing community chats.
Five 12month Support Prizes
We’re awarding five participants a package of monthly mentoring sessions to extend their support to 12months.
Time commitment
All participants need to attend an initial pod meet-up online, 10-11am 30th January 2026, or schedule an alternative with the CUBE team and their pod.
Each week from 20th February to 27th March participants will:
- take part in 2hrs high-participation workshops Friday 10-12, and
- spend a minimum of 2hrs working on project assignments
Project assignments are a mix of peer-reviews (pod challenges) and development plan creation (working on, not in, their own businesses).
Participants also have access to 3 development plan advice sessions with the Enterprise CUBE team.
Programme Details
Initial Group Meeting: 30 January – 10-11am Pod Meetup
Group Workshops: Fridays – 20 February to 27 March – 10am – 12noon
Peer Meetups Timing: Tuesdays 1 – 4 pm. Please try to keep this time available to meet your peers each week. You may be able to mutually agree alternative times once you’ve been introduced.
Workshop Location: Online – via Zoom (active peer-sessions live-only)
Competition Deadline: midnight, 31 March 2026
How much support do I get?
The Better Business support package includes:
- 1 onboarding group session
- 6 live group workshops (online),
- 3 advice sessions, and
- a set of digital resources and tools
Better Business support will also guide and facilitate:
- 3 pod (peer group) challenges,
- 3 development plans challenges,
- 3 network broadening exchanges
Better Business also comes with a competition, where 5 founders will win monthly one-to-one mentoring extending our support to 12months.
What is a pod?
At Better Business you’ll engage with the whole cohort, but you’ll work in a more intensive and focussed way with a small pod of three similar businesses. In your pod, you’ll tackle three challenges exploring the practices of each business. Working together you’ll suggest improvements, solutions and share best practise.
How do you pick our pods?
Pods are curated by the Enterprise CUBE team, based on your sector, challenges, scale and style.
What if my pod doesn’t work for me?
You’ll meet your pod three weeks before the project starts, get to know each other – and make a pod-promise on times, commitment, and peer exchanges.
We’re all professionals and we’re sure you’ll get on with your pod as constructive critical friends. However, if you feel you are mismatched in your pod, we can and will re-shuffle pods after our initial pod meetup – to ensure you’re in the best pod for you, your business, and your challenges before the programme starts.
Did you say 12 months mentoring?
Yes, we did.
We have five mentoring prizes to give out. Each prize includes 9 one-to-one mentoring sessions from the Enterprise CUBE team; these monthly sessions will extend your support to 12months.
To enter the mentoring competition, you just need to submit a one-page application by midnight, 31 March 2026.
What does Better Business cover?
The themes of our six workshops:
Finessing your Funnel
To drive better conversion rates, customer retention and referrals, we’ll deep dive into the customer’s journey helping you find new ways to entice, excite and exceed expectations.
Maximising Your Marketing
Starting with an audit of your current digital marketing, we’ll work to build new strategies and skills to drive traction and increased return on your investment of time and money.
System for Scale
We’ll zoom out to help you take in the big strategic picture, before diving back into the business details to look at where you really add value, your key hires, automation and streamlining your business operations.
Am I eligible?
To be eligible you need to be trading and be confident in your core offer.
This course is best suited to businesses who have the fundamentals in place but want to unlock the next stage in their business journey.
To take part you will need to be trading, and have:
- a customer profile (persona, avatar or description),
- a brand (guidelines or similar document)
- an online presence and some social/digital marketing,
- a cash flow or be able to share 12month marketing and business development budget.
If you are just starting out, we’d suggest attending one of our start-up projects first which will help you with your core offer, target audience, brand and basic financial planning. You can pre-register for Strive start-up here.
Register now