Each quarter, we pick 18 high-growth businesses to take part in our Innovating for Growth: Scale-ups programme, where businesses receive £10,000 worth of tailored and bespoke business support and advice. Not only do businesses gain three months of guidance, they also receive automatic membership to our Growth Club and their own Relationship Manager.

This quarter, we’re following Haroun, Director of JRPass, a train travel company for those exploring Japan by rail. Haroun will talk us through each session as he progresses through the programme to get the successes and challenges of what it’s like to run a growing businesses. You can see Haroun’s first blog on refining your business model and developing a growth strategy here, but this week, he talks us through the next lot of workshops and one-to-ones…

Branding

Tuesday 23 July

A large part of what attracted me to the Innovating for Growth programme was the branding component. It’s something that I have been thinking a lot about of late and we have to do much more work on. This week I attended the Branding workshop run by ABA agency. There were a lot of takeaways, especially concerning building an identity and the power of personality of a brand. This is vital in terms of your positioning in the marketplace, and crafting an authentic story with messaging behind your company’s journey. The most interesting and fun part was to break your brand identity down into terms of personality archetypes, for example The Magician, The Outlaw, The Lover!

For JRPass.com, I chose three:

1. The Sage – At JRPass.com we are domain experts with deep knowledge of Japan. I hope we have sage-like characteristics of being smart, knowledgeable and wise about travelling there. One example being the free planning tools we provide for events such as the upcoming Rugby World Cup.
2. The Ruler – As a company we are responsible and reliable in processing and dealing with our customer’s important and time-sensitive orders. We take great care in looking after our customers and ensuring they have a stress-free experience. 
3. The Explorer – This should be self-explanatory! We don’t sell packages and hope to encourage independent travel and hope to facilitate some wonderful discoveries and experiences.

JRPass free planning tools for events such as the upcoming Rugby World Cup

At first this seemed quite an abstract exercise but it actually really did help to drill down into the character of our company brand.

Research

This week I also had a one-to-one to introduce me to the Business & IP Centre’s business research facilities. We can gain access to normally quite expensive industry reports from leading intel agencies on marketplace conditions and competitor analysis (Ed note: The Business & IP Centre has over £5m worth of online market reports from top publishers Mintel, Frost & Sullivan, Euromonitor and more as well as company data, business directories and more!). It was cool to see on one report on rail passes in Japan, our site was listed as the leader worldwide!

Visit our website for more information about the programme and how to apply.

You can read the next part of Haroun's Innovating for Growth diary here.