Ask An Entrepreneur Series: Hustle, cold-calling and other essentials with Rita W Bologna

Whether it is winning your first customers, getting finance or finding people to work with you, one of the key skills for any founder is to be able to hustle. It is a subtle art somewhere between persuasion and negotiation but can often feel like intimidation when done poorly. Like any art it is a mixture of skill and the hard knocks of experience.
The Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the London Business School and The Company of Entrepreneurs are proud to share an hour packed full of spontaneous advice on how to hustle when starting your business.

Rita W Bologna talks to us about how she hustled her way to setting up five successful companies overcoming many hurdles from an immigrant and single mother background.

We finished by applying these principles to two very different LBS alumnus founded businesses – Dev Majumder of ESG Base and Matt Brooke-Hitching of meet.mba.

The event was facilitated by Jeff Skinner, Executive Director of Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at London Business School.

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About Rita W Bologna: Award winning Business Woman of the Year and Best New Company in its first year of trading. Founder and CEO of The Good Global Group Ltd, The Good Titles and The Good Events & PR Company, with the businesses focusing on publishing luxury magazines, PR, Digital Marketing and corporate events. Rita is a Freeman and a Principal Benefactor of The Company of Entrepreneurs.

She is an expert in strategic influencing, persuasion and hustling, to enable successful transitioning of goals into action and achievement. She is an Entrepreneur with over 30 years of experience in starting and building new businesses and as an enterprising person or ‘hustler’ with a determination to succeed, she initiated profitable enterprises in IT recruitment, finance, advertising, beauty spas and retail. She created some key assets within her companies of detailed databases of high-net-worth professionals which were fundamental within her exit strategy of The Good Global Group. Since the sale of the businesses in 2017 Rita is now a Business Strategist on a not-for-profit basis assisting start-up founders Nationwide.
About Jeff Skinner: Jeff Skinner is Executive Director of the Institute of Innovation and Entrepreneurship at LBS. He teaches on several entrepreneurship courses at the School and leads many of the co-curricular activities supported by the Institute.
Prior to joining the School, Jeff was commercial director at University College London (UCL), where he built its Technology Transfer division. Working alongside senior academics, he co-founded more than 30 technology-based spin outs that collectively raised more than £30 million in first round capital.
About IIE: https://www.london.edu/faculty-and-research/institute-of-innovation-and-entrepreneurship