A practical capability programme for owners and operators of small businesses. You learn to operate confidently as a digital business, wherever you are starting from, with coaching from a senior practitioner. You finish with a working Digital Literacy Uplift Playbook that is yours, that evolves as your business does, and that tells you and any supplier exactly what good looks like in your business.
Delivered one-to-one. Six weeks. NZ$3,800 plus GST.
You might be at the very start. No domain name, no business email, no website. Customers still find you by word of mouth or because they know your number. You know you cannot keep going that way, and you do not know what the first sensible steps are.
You might be a few steps in. You have a domain, an email address, maybe a website someone set up for you years ago. None of it feels like a plan. You are not sure whether the foundations are right, what you should be doing next, or how to tell if you are falling behind.
You might be further along. Your business has accumulated tools, subscriptions, and systems over years without anyone planning it. You suspect it is costing you in money or in time or in risk. You do not know what to keep, what to fix, what to retire, or who to trust to tell you.
Three different starting points. Same underlying gap. Nobody taught you how to operate as a digital business. The vendors all sell something. The IT partners want a contract. The strategy firms quote you for a project. Nobody is offering to sit beside you and teach you how to make these decisions yourself, in the kind of business you actually run.
This programme closes that gap. You bring your business, wherever it sits. We bring the practice. By the end you can make digital decisions confidently, you know what good looks like for a business your size, and you have a written record of all of it in a document you keep.
You will know the foundations any modern business needs in place: a proper domain name, business email that uses it, a sensible online presence, and what each of these is for. If you have them already, you will know whether they are right. If you do not, you will have a clear plan for putting them in place, in the right order.
You will be able to evaluate any digital offer in front of you and decide whether it is worth your money and time. You will know the questions to ask, the answers to look for, and the answers that should make you walk away. You will not need to take a vendor’s word for it.
You will know the small number of things that matter most for protecting a small business. Not enterprise-grade theatre. Not “she’ll be right.” A clear, practical picture of the real risks for your business and what to do about each one.
You will be able to write a clear brief for any technology supplier, in plain language, that tells them what you need and what you do not. You will know how to choose between suppliers, how to read what they send back, and how to know when a job is done.
You will look at the work that fills your week and know which parts are worth making digital, which parts are fine staying manual, and what the trade-offs are. You will not chase digital for its own sake. You will not stay manual out of habit.
New tools, new platforms, new urgent emails about the cloud arrive constantly. You will have a method for evaluating what is new against what you already have, and for staying current without panic. You will be able to make decisions calmly when others around you are reacting.
Across the six weeks of the programme you build a working document called your Digital Literacy Uplift Playbook. It is not a deliverable Cloverbase writes and hands to you. It is a structured document you construct yourself, with coaching, that captures everything you have worked out about operating your business in a digital world.
The Playbook is delivered as a designed PDF with checklists, decision records, and priority plans. It is built to be printed, pinned to a wall, marked up, and used. It is the document you draw on when you need to brief a supplier, sharing the parts that are relevant so they know what good looks like in your business. It is the document you check before signing a new subscription. It is the document you review when something feels off and you want to know what your own past decisions were.
Most importantly, it is a living document. The Playbook is built to be reissued. As your business changes, as the tools improve, as you complete items on your priority plan, you update the Playbook. It is not a snapshot of what you knew on the last day of the programme. It is the working record of how your business operates digitally, kept current by you.
A Playbook typically contains
You leave the programme with your first complete version. The version that matters is the one you have three years from now.
You spend the first week walking through a structured conversation about your business, the work you do, the customers you do it for, and where you currently sit digitally. There are no wrong answers and no technical background required. The output is a working profile of your business and a clear picture of your current starting point, which might be very early, somewhere in the middle, or further along.
About three hours, at your own pace.
You work through the Playbook one stage at a time. Each stage focuses on one capability: your digital identity, evaluating tools and suppliers, cyber security, briefing suppliers, deciding what to make digital, staying current. You build, you draft, you test the decisions against your real business, with structured guidance the whole way.
About five hours across the two weeks. You are not on Cloverbase’s clock.
By this point you have a draft Playbook. The first coaching session is where you walk Mark through what you have built and where you are stuck. The session is structured, not freeform. You leave the call with clear direction on what to refine before the second session.
Thirty minutes. Live, with Mark, on Microsoft Teams.
You refine the Playbook based on the first coaching session. You start applying it in your real decisions: a tool you are considering, a supplier conversation, a renewal you have been putting off. You bring the questions and the friction you find back into the system, where you get fast written feedback between sessions.
About four hours of building, plus the time you spend applying it in your real work that week.
The final coaching session is where you finalise your Playbook and lock in the method you will use to keep it current. You leave the session with a finished v1 Playbook, a clear plan for keeping it alive, and a Credly-issued credential from Cloverbase listing the digital capabilities you have built. The credential is independently verifiable, yours to display on LinkedIn or in any professional record you keep, and recognised across the Credly network.
Thirty minutes. Live, with Mark, on Microsoft Teams.
The programme is complete. The Playbook is yours. You keep editing it. Cloverbase is available for follow-up engagements if you want them, and not required if you do not.
This is for you if
This is not for you if
Mark Smith is the co-founder of Cloverbase and the practitioner who delivers this programme directly. Every coaching session is with Mark.
Mark is the only practitioner you work with through this programme. There is no junior team member, no offshore delivery team, no handover to someone else mid-programme. The coaching sessions, the written feedback between sessions, and the structured method you work through are all his.
plus GST. Per participant. Full programme.
The fee covers the entire programme. The structured Playbook-building method. The two coaching sessions with Mark. The between-session written feedback. The final Playbook. The Credly credential.
There are no upsells, no add-ons, no premium tiers, and no follow-on retainer required. The programme is what is described on this page. If you find later that you want to build further capability, we run a companion AI Literacy programme on the same model. That decision is yours, after this programme has finished.
Yes. The programme welcomes business owners at the very start of being digital, and the early stages of the Playbook are built for exactly your situation. You will work through your digital identity, what name to register, what email setup to choose, what kind of online presence makes sense for your business, with structured guidance and a clear written record at the end. Starting from very little can be an advantage. You make the decisions once, properly, instead of trying to unpick decisions someone else made years ago.
No. The programme is built for owners who are not technical and do not want to become technical. There is no jargon, no scripting, no system administration. The work is decision-making in plain language. The whole point of the Playbook is that you finish it able to make good calls and brief technical people clearly, without having to do the technical work yourself.
Outside experts produce work you then have to act on, or pay them to act on. This programme produces capability that stays with you. You build the Playbook, with coaching, and you understand every decision in it because you made it. When something changes next year, you can update it yourself. The two are different products built for different jobs.
No. The programme is platform-agnostic and we do not sell or resell any technology. What you will learn is how to evaluate any digital tool or supplier and make your own call. You leave able to make those decisions yourself, which is more valuable than being handed a list.
No. A two-person business is a great fit for this programme. The Playbook scales to the size of your operation; smaller businesses produce a tighter, sharper Playbook with fewer moving parts. The decisions are still real, the consequences are still real, and the value of getting them right is, if anything, higher in a small business where every dollar counts.
Yes, at the right level for a business of your size. The programme covers the small number of practical cyber security decisions that matter most for a small business. It is not enterprise-grade cyber strategy and it does not pretend to be. It is enough to protect your business sensibly and to know when something is beyond your scope and needs a specialist.
The Playbook is built inside a Cloverbase workspace at builder.cloverbase.com so you do not need to set up your own tooling to start working. You decide what goes in. At the end of the programme you download your finished Playbook as a designed PDF. It then lives on your own device, separate from any Cloverbase system, and you use it as a working record and a brief you can hand to any supplier. The judgement you build during the programme about which suppliers and tools can be trusted with what is the lasting part, and it travels with you.
Many participants do. The Playbook is the start of a clear digital direction for your business, and that direction deepens over time. We offer follow-on engagements for participants who want to build further capability, run a parallel AI Literacy programme, or take their team through the same method. None of this is required. The Playbook works on its own.
The first step is a short conversation. We will not enrol you if the programme is not the right fit. The conversation works out whether it is, and what enrolment timing looks like.
The conversation is free. There is no expectation either way.