As a growing business owner, your company is becoming more complex. You need someone to dive into your business strategies with you. Ascent brings high-quality coaches, advisors, and mentors alongside you and your leadership team with a structured team-based approach to help you build a thriving Kingdom business. We will help you identify trouble spots and key growth opportunities so you can 2X, 3X, even 10X your revenue.
And you don’t have to go through it alone. Ascent walks alongside you and your leadership team as you strengthen your business, deepen your impact, and build a flourishing Kingdom enterprise. Apply today and discover what happens when faith and strategy come together.
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“Ascent has been the best investment we’ve ever made as a company. We are now able to chart a pathway to bridge the gap between our current reality and envisioned future.”
Ray Barreth is a serial entrepreneur and has 35 yearsʼ experience creating, directing, and leading SME ventures in the United States, United Kingdom, and Europe. As a serial entrepreneur, Ray has launched six companies from product inception to scale. His companies ranged in size from $40M U.S.to exceeding $100M U.S. in revenue. Ray coached entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and the Silicon Prairie, in the Kansas City Start-Up Village. Ray has also trained, coached, and grown African companies through his Venture Village (V2) GROWTH Lab which operated in Zambia and Nigeria.
Martin is a seasoned business and organizational strategist with over 13 years of experience working with a major Kenyan international company, including leading the innovation hub. Martin is passionate about innovation and co-creation with the start-up/SME ecosystems as a practical and mutually beneficial way of solving existing and emerging business challenges. He has mentored and coached start-ups to build sustainable business models. He believes in pushing boundaries and that impossible is only a figment of our imagination.
Toby is passionate about seeing entrepreneurs flourish in frontier markets, embracing both building businesses with excellence and intentionally living out their faith and values through their endeavors. Toby has worked with African entrepreneurs committed to growing impactful businesses for nearly a decade. Tobyʼs career prior to Sinapis involved working with executive teams of leading domestic and international institutions successfully addressing core strategy and performance issues. As a partner at Deloitte Consulting and Kearney Consulting, he was responsible for building practices and serving Tier 1 clients. His focus-areas included growth strategy development and execution and customer experience enhancement. Toby received an MBA from Harvard University and a B.A. in Economics from Vanderbilt University.
Favour is part of the Acceleration & Advisory Team at Sinapis, serving growth-stage entrepreneurs and their businesses. He is a passionate impact entrepreneur whose journey began as early as university, where he served on the boards of five different student and youth organizations, participated in accelerators, competed internationally, and raised multiple funding rounds.Favour is currently a co-founder and board member of various companies across tech, manufacturing, and services, and is actively involved in growing several businesses. Favour has experience in investment advisory, deal structuring, portfolio management, business development, strategy, marketing, and analytics. His technology background spans blockchain, IoT, AI, fintech, hardware manufacturing, exports, and some exposure to agricultural value chains. He is driven by a passion for impactful innovation and entrepreneurship for a greater Africa.
Ngwing has a wealth of experience from supporting over 300 individuals and businesses to achieve substantial financial growth. She has over 20 years of experience helping businesses to streamline operations, launch new branches, manage finances, execute strategies and implement effective operating standards and procedures. A passionate entrepreneur and finance coach, she believes in purposeful entrepreneurship in Africa as a way to generate wealth and employment for the continent and future generations. She is a Commonwealth Scholar with an MPA/ID from the University of York, UK and Dual Bachelor’s Degrees in Accounting and Business Administration from UW- Green Bay, USA.
“Unlike other programs, Ascent has clearly delivered on the promise to connect with and engage investors.”
Get honest, constructive feedback on your business and how you are presenting it. We have a group of investors who engage with you during the Ascent journey. They include:
You will also be connected with a broader array of local and international investors, through and after the Ascent pitch event. This includes preferred access to the Faith Driven Investor Marketplace, representing more than 750 accredited investors.
“I’ve been through a variety of programs, but this has been truly distinctive and impactful.... it has enabled me to bring my leadership team along and for us to move forward.”
The application process just takes 10 minutes
Discuss your business challenges and goals to see if this is the right solution for you
Break free from incremental growth
Ascent takes place over twelve months with a small cohort of similar level growth-stage businesses, and consists of four primary elements: multi-day leadership team workshops, founders round tables, investment readiness-related activities, and mentor engagement. Together, these are designed to provide structure, space, assistance, and active engagement with other entrepreneurs to chart growth pathways (both business and personal) and remove bottlenecks and obstacles.
A key component of Ascent is a series of workshops that work through core business dimensions — strategy, sales, operations, and overall management — to define where and how to maximize growth potential and solve constraints to growth.
The first working session is held individually with each business’ leadership team. The DiSC assessment framework and results provide the context and content for working to enhance how the leadership team can work more effectively together. The work done here sets the direction for ongoing advancement of how the team can improve effectiveness in the coming months.
During the following months, we conduct a series of six multi-day workshops that bring cohort teams together with clearly defined objectives. Anchoring on a modified lean canvas structure and utilizing other frameworks, we will work with teams as they consider the “art of the possible” for their businesses, define and architect pathways to growth, and solve bottlenecks. These workshops also create space for peer-to-peer support and learning. Each team has the opportunity to provide constructive feedback and collaborate in the exploration of new ideas.
In these workshops, we also address how personal faith and values can factor into how businesses are built and led. How can brokenness in lives and communities be addressed through entrepreneurship? How can a business be an agent for transformational change? How could intentional consideration of these questions inform business design, decision-making, and stakeholder engagement? There are modules to explore these questions throughout.
The following is the slate of workshops and their objectives:
In addition to the workshops, a series of four round tables are held during the initial seven months. These are designed for founders only, recognizing their unique responsibilities and challenges.
These sessions address leadership, culture, governance, and personal wellbeing. These times together are also intended to be energizing and reinvigorating. The founder’s journey is often a difficult and lonely one. We desire to foster honest discussion and sharing, which leads to the building of relationships that can be sources of support that continue beyond the program.
Below is the slate of founders’ round tables:
Browse their business bios!
