Last year I took a business incubation course to increase my knowledge, expand my network, and really get more direction for Insanitek and myself. The course I decided to take was called The Flight Formula. I’d give you the link to it, but the website appears to be down now. If you’d like to learn more about it before I give my two cents about it, you can see the introduction video here:

In a nutshell you can see that it’s a fairly standard business incubator. They try to break down barriers to get to the core of you, which is supposed to help you see where your strengths of character lie, and thus how you might align with your clients. From there, they start breaking into more things like how you want to structure your life compared to where you are now. Of course, that part is designed to help you get more of an idea of where you are and where you want to be so you can purposefully move forward.

The last half of the incubator was more about businesses, how to stand out using what you have discovered from the exercises above, and some great marketing tips. Actually, Tom Morkes showed us a lot of valuable tips on how to use a lean canvas for our business venture and ideas, then how to move forward with intent.

But the incubator wasn’t that great for me. 

OK, I’d be lying if I said I got much out of it at all. I chose this particular incubator out of all the ones that are out there because it had a more holistic take on things from both the personal and the business side. That appealed to me since I’m trying to make Insanitek more than just a faceless company that churns out more faceless entities. (Ugh, am I right?)

The second deciding factor was the Pay What You Want pricing. I got to choose how much I thought it would be worth and how much was fair. Since it was an online version of their in-person venue, I knew it would take a lot less of the creator’s time. Everything was in a website, and the only thing we had to worry about was an hour phone call every other week. All the rest was prompt then DIY, come back and talk about the experiences and a-ha’s on the phone. Oh, and we got a private Facebook group. It was not worth the few thousand they suggested, but a few hundred I could see doing.

It was them… and me.

I thought I wanted a holistic approach to things. That was until they started prying into things that really didn’t concern the company or them. Stuff happened in the past (like getting violently raped and left for dead) which might have helped build my character of strength, but has nothing to do with a science incubator. That’s when they started to lose me. And that was only week 2 of the programme.I’ll give it that all little episodes have helped build up what I want to do for employees and subcontractors, but that was not the aim of the conversation. Their aim was to help the person see this and use it to make a service or business out of. Clearly, this tactic wasn’t going to work for someone who already had a business foundation set, and it sure as hell didn’t have anything to do with some of the darker things in life.

Then, they started to lose me again when all connections to the website were cut, and all communications went through either the group phone calls or Facebook. I abhor Facebook even when I log on once a week to check on my little sister, so I wasn’t going to willing go onto the site for a business incubator. If they had left the website up with all the resources and conversations, I might have gotten on a bit better.

And, they lost me for good when the phone calls started being recorded and put on YouTube in the first sessions. They wanted me to spill secrets I wasn’t happy about talking about in the first place. I don’t like to talk about the darker times in life, yet that is exactly what they prodding after. And they recorded the calls and put it in a hidden link on YouTube. Anyone with a link can access that and listen to our darker stories.

A note about my darker side: If you know me personally, you know that I was raped and left for dead, was a homeless college student, got shot off of a roof in the military, dealt with cervical cancer, and far more. I’ve also not had the best of childhoods. But you also know that I am tough, take life as it comes, and see the past as the past. It helps build strength of character and define some purposes in life, but it’s not something I willingly talk about. Wallowing in it just not who I am. Talking about these things in detail with complete strangers is well beyond my level of comfort, and that is exactly what they wanted me to do — and recorded the bloody thing and put it on social media. 

On top of that, the information itself was only marginally useful. 

Anyone with common sense and the ability to self direct would not have found this incubator useful at all. There were very few sections I did find useful, and all of them were in the later half. The Lean Canvas, for example, was awesome. While anyone can head to the Lean Stack website and make their own, Tom walking us through it really helped it to come alive and real. It made clarifying the business concept and plan relatively painless.

I wish I could remember other things a year after the fact, but in truth I just don’t. About halfway through our incubator class, they took down the website promising to build another one and all the resources would be back. So far it isn’t, and I can’t remember a single thing with any form of clarity from other parts of the class. There was something about standing out among an ocean, which is basically a copywriting tactic so you can pronounce why you are different from all the other businesses just like yours. But, I don’t remember it because I think anything off The Middle Finger Project is more piquant.

You might find it useful if…

The Flight Formula isn’t for everyone. It’s for people who have a half-considered, half-baked plan of what they want to do. If you are more than halfway, you probably won’t find the beginning of the programme useful at all. There may be a difference in the live version where you spend a lot of time and money to camp out with the “tribe” you’ll work with. No escape from building friendships? No distractions from the tearful stories? I can see that working a lot better.

As for the second half, I believe anyone could get a good deal of use of it. However, you can also find these tactics for free to relatively cheap if you read a variety of blogs and take advantage of a library. There is something to be said for the way Tom directs and teaches though. He brings a notion of simplicity and clarity to the processes and tasks that make you sigh with relief or smack your head for the obviousness you missed.

Do I think it was worth the $600 I spent on it? No. Definitely not since the website with all the resources is no longer found. Do I think it would be worth thousands of dollars to visit them in person and do a live venue? That depends on your personality and if you need it. It’s definitely not worth that price online where you don’t forge the deeper friendships and “tribe” that they are striving for and would have really made it a more meaningful incubator.