Plans vs Reality: Managing the Tension

At the NEA, we work closely with a few regional development authorities (SEEDA and NWDA) in the UK. They supported us financially in the early days based on our original business plan.

As with any start-up, reality has now taken over our business plan projections.

So now there is some tension between what the RDA's funded and where we're going in the real world. We're iterating new products and services, while the RDAs think we should be educating the numbers of students we talked about 2 years ago.

This means that I spend a lot of time keeping them on-side; making sure that they still support our original vision (which hasn't changed) while allowing us to find the best business model for sustainability.