The EAS Program | Overview | The EAS Process | Get Involved

Gallup's Entrepreneur Acceleration System (EAS) combines the best of existing entrepreneurial development thinking with Gallup's deep experience understanding the human motivations, attitudes, and behaviors that correlate with faster and more sustainable firm growth. The program specifically targets SMEs that have significant potential for economic growth.

EAS focuses on behavioral economic management principles. No other entrepreneur acceleration program uses this tested and proven approach.

• Building Entrepreneurial Strengths and Talents: understanding and maximizing an individual's innate talents and systematically building strengths-based teams
• Creating a Road Map for Growth: the process of outlining a vision, spelling out goals, and creating a plan to achieve those goals
• Creating Engaged Workplaces: building teams of talented employees and thinking about how to grow and evolve the team structure into the future
• Building an Emotional Connection to Customers: cultivating a more personal approach to knowing customers and their needs, with the goal of creating relationships more important than "just price"
• Learning the Fundamentals of Performance Management: tracking Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

"As a direct result of employing some of the engagement techniques and concepts from the program with our clients, we have booked nine new projects in just the last month. Because of the new projects and the increase in productivity, Phoenix Web Group's profits have increased to seven times what they were compared with 2010" -- Phoenix Web Group

The world's largest organizations have employed these behavioral economic management principles for many years, and they are often a differentiating factor in enterprise success or failure. Gallup's EAS allows entrepreneurs to harness and use the same behavioral economics principles and practices the world's most successful organizations use.

The most critical problem facing world leaders today is the lack of good jobs. This finding is based on Gallup's global research aimed at solving the world's foremost problems. Gallup's rigorous studies have shown that the desire for a good job is universal. It also takes precedence over all other wants and needs, including love, money, food, shelter, safety, and freedom. In short, what the whole world wants is a good job.

This critical situation requires a new and innovative approach for attaining sustainable economic development, business growth, and real job creation.

Job creation research shows that small to medium-sized businesses (SMEs) typically account for the majority of local job creation. Studies also indicate that about 5% of new organizations create 50% of the jobs.

The key difference between an SME's likelihood of creating jobs lies in the individual ability of each entrepreneur. The founding entrepreneur's talents, motivations, and attitudes are the most important factors for firm survival and growth. Over the long term, these factors may even eclipse the original business idea that launched the business.

The Problem With Most Job Creation Programs

Many traditional incubators and accelerators focused on SMEs are well-intentioned but fall short of having an optimal effect because they are not designed to take into account a fundamental truth: developing entrepreneurial leaders is as much about behavioral development as it is about functional/operational development.

In recent years, public and private institutions have launched numerous support programs and "business incubators" to spur entrepreneurial activity worldwide. These programs ultimately strive to generate economic growth and job creation. Most assist with business issues, such as access to capital, or offer skills and management training about business development, banking, accounting, and marketing. Others propose removal of economic and regulatory hurdles inhibiting entrepreneurial development. While these initiatives focus on important aspects of business development, most overlook a critical element - a scientific and systematic focus on the human capital of entrepreneurs and their core teams.

Designed to Work With and Complement Existing Entrepreneur Development Programs and Systems

The Process

EAS is a highly targeted, strategic intervention for entrepreneurs. The system steps are as follows:

• Assessment: Gallup experts begin by working with sponsors to assess the current and desired state of entrepreneurship development programs. Experts review the local economic conditions to help determine the number of entrepreneurs to target and in which industries to focus to achieve the highest and most sustainable effect.
• Implementation: Gallup selects and trains guides to work closely with individual entrepreneurs in a 12-month talent-based development program. On average, guides maintain a 1-5 ratio (i.e., one guide for approximately five high-potential entrepreneurs). The guides partner with a Super Guide (Gallup Consultant) who continually supports them. The guide establishes an online account for each entrepreneur on the Knowledge Portal, a Web-based platform that captures the journey of the entrepreneur through qualitative and quantitative measurement.
• Intervention: Gallup researchers scientifically identify the entrepreneurial talents required for each stage of the business life cycle. Guides focus on strengthening entrepreneurs' talents through individual executive coaching, leadership team building, and other consultative activities. Next, the program introduces entrepreneurs to behavioral economic management principles such as the importance of creating engaged workplaces and customers, fundamentals of performance management, and creating strength-based teams/organizations. Finally, the program focuses on enhancing individual talents by providing an interactive forum to learn from external experts and established entrepreneurs.
• Ongoing Support and Tracking: Gallup's Knowledge Portal continues to engage and track entrepreneurs by capturing KPIs for up to five years after the intervention, thus providing researchers and economists an opportunity to maintain the relationships and to encourage intra/inter-cohort relationships with others using the same behavioral economic systems. Over time, the Knowledge Portal will accumulate vast amounts of data on these firms - a critical tool for extensive longitudinal analysis and reporting.

To measure and track the success of an EAS initiative, Gallup uses systemic performance measurements to assess and report EAS' effect on program participants. Gallup measures program effects at three distinct levels and reports results in six-month intervals:

• Micro-level: changes in the SME leader's confidence and self-awareness, which has a proven long-term effect on the firm's growth and success.
• Meso-level: changes in the firm's performance measured through 14 KPIs.
• Macro-level: monitoring key economic outcome measures in the larger community or locale such as unemployment rates, new business starts, and survival rates.

Sponsors and Funding

EAS initiatives are collaborative partnerships funded by public and/or private-sector organizations dedicated to accelerating organic economic development in a city, state, region, or country. By using a sponsorship model, Gallup-certified guides (who deliver the organization-level consulting and learning) and the selected high-potential entrepreneurs receive full scholarships that cover the first year of program participation.

After the first year of program participation, SMEs have the opportunity to work directly with Gallup to sustain their continuous performance improvement and renew their annual EAS certification. Gallup charges organizations that want to continue participation in the EAS initiative for these services in accordance with a pricing model based on organization size (number of employees).

Constituencies That Participate in and Benefit From EAS

Three constituencies - sponsors, guides, and entrepreneurs - are required to participate in EAS. The degree of each group's buy-in and engagement is vital to achieving maximum benefits for all participants.

Sponsors

• The role of sponsors is to garner financial support for the overall program and to recruit and engage the guides who will coach the entrepreneurs.
• The benefits sponsors enjoy include heightened visibility and name recognition as well as being directly associated with a successful job-creation initiative. Additional benefits include the opportunity to realize greater fulfillment of organizational mission and to deliver more value to the constituencies they are providing services to.

Guides

• Guides are required to complete Gallup's guide training and certification program, recruit participating SMEs to the program, and to administer the Gallup-designed training and consulting curriculum to SMEs.
• Guides benefit by receiving extensive training and experience in using advanced behavioral economic consulting principles and tools, allowing them to become much more effective strategic consultants to SME clients.

Participants

• The role of participants is to attend Gallup workshops and guide-led sessions, create and implement impact plans, and to report on the successes achieved through program participation.
• Participants enjoy numerous immediate and long-term benefits, including deeper team and customer relationships, accelerated business growth, and access to the types of consulting services that only larger firms can afford.