We promoted this annual event exclusively via social media and it sold out 2 weeks before the event date. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that it was free. Small business owners and entrepreneurs descended upon the Marriott Westshore for what we hoped would be a good use of their time. Fortunately, it looks like we pulled it off. I was the emcee and after getting everybody situated, I introduced Paul Brooks a fellow Score volunteer who gave a very nice talk on getting your business “unstuck”. This was followed by my moderating a panel of Score volunteers with audience submitted questions. Talk about being put on the spot! Bill Wright, Yanina Rosario, Linda Philips and Kit Werremeyer almost seemed like they had rehearsed their impromptu answers. What I thought might be a disaster, turned out perfectly.

After the panel discussion we all took a coffee break and split the main room into two workshop rooms. While a third of the attendees went on the get their counseling sessions, Kit and I each gave presentations to the other two-thirds and then we repeated them. Kit’s presentation was on Business Planning and mine was on Social media. I have some video of it here. The video is mostly of me… but hey it’s my blog.

Anyway, we sent out a Post Event Email Survey, and even though we are still getting responses, I wanted to share some of the feedback received so far:

In response to the question “What is your overall level of satisfaction with this event?” 100% of attendees said “Very satisfied”, our top answer.

While Kit received great feedback for his presentation, again since it is my blog, I will share with you the comments submitted about my presentation on Social Media Marketing (Kit needs to start his own blog):

“Wow. This is what I came for and all I can say is, Wow. I knew I was going to have to become involved in social media, but this opened my eyes to the subject in a way I had not considered at all. I am not even close to digesting all of it yet and I considered myself a pretty savvy internet user going in. Not to mention that Steve is one of the best speakers I’ve ever heard and was SO informative on this subject. I’d gladly sit through this presentation again!”

“Very interesting, first time I have really had an understanding of what social media is and how it works.”

“Steve’s presentation was exceptionally helpful and clarified many questions that I had about the various social media sites. Knowledgeable and entertaining all rolled into one! He is a master public speaker – born to entertain!”

“He was amazing”

“Perfect for what I was looking for. A great insight as to where to start. Steve also put in perspective a few somewhat “myths”. Great presentation.”

“I am interested in taking the 3 hour presentation he is offering next week.”

“Learned many things I want to implement.”

“Excellent and very interesting”

Before my head gets too big, we did have one negative issue mentioned by a few people: “It was too cold!”.

On behalf of the three local chapters of Score, I want to thank everyone for a great event, we all look forward to doing it again soon.

Most of you know I am a SCORE volunteer counselor, I seem to be the one who can’t say no. I am Chairman of the IT Committee as well as a member of several others, and now I really bit off a chunk. SCORE National has asked me to lead a team of 40 nationwide volunteers to thrash the new iSCORE web portal through its development. By thrash, I mean thoroughly test. It was determined that this is only really a 10 person undertaking, but when you consider that the testers are volunteers, you have to multiply by 4. This is a really big deal for SCORE. When you consider that they have close to 400 chapters and 12,000 volunteers, that’s a lot of cats to herd. Right now SCORE’s system is really antiquated, and each chapter has it’s own website. iSCORE will be a massive undertaking; not only will the main www.score.org site be completely re-vamped, but all of the chapter sites will be absorbed into this main portal. SCORE also serves two masters…we have clients seeking counseling and workshops who need to be able to navigate the portal, as well as 12,000 volunteers who need to access the system backend to log their activities and counseling sessions and manage workshops. By the way, neither of these two groups are particularly tech savvy, so I think testing is going to be a focal point of the project. I’ll keep you posted as we progress.

Also related to SCORE, I will be emceeing, Panel moderating and presenting at our biggest event to date. The SCORE/American Express Speed Counseling event in Tampa on September 14th. We are expecting 150 small business owners to take advantage of this free event. You can get more info on our calendar page at www.tampascore.org.

Lastly, I am working out the details for my own big event which is Internet Marketing for CEO’s. This will be an all day seminar event that will travel around the state starting in Tampa. I can tell you, social media research is a real challenge these days, just when you think you got it, it all changes again. I plan to do this event once a month and I will guarantee you that by the third one, my material will be out of date and I will have to redo it all. But what an exciting topic.

That’s all for now, other than a shameless plug: If you hear of anyone needing a speaker or emcee for an event, please give them my name.

Steve

So I figured out that about 90% of my 60 hour working week is unpaid, leaving only about 10% revenue generating. Don’t get me wrong, I am doing fine, but with only 10% of my effort generating cash, I decided to come up with some other ideas to “monetize” (the new word for “make more money”) .

Even though about 40% of my time is SCORE related, I cannot monetize any of that. SCORE (a quasi-governmental dictatorship) has a strict policy that you cannot make a dime on anything even remotely related to SCORE. Once a year they round up all of the counselors who may have accidentally conceded a lunch check while wearing their SCORE name tag and fly them all out to the USS Nimitz in the middle of the ocean and push them off the stern. Again, don’t get me wrong, I am thoroughly enjoying my experience with SCORE and the time I spend is by my choice.

Next up clients… hmm. Do you think they would mind if I left a bill with the receptionist on way out of my introductory meeting? Attorney’s do it.  Can’t very well monetize writing proposals to them… attaching an invoice doesn’t seem like it would get very far there either.

My friends?  Oh, one of these days I too will come up with a way to take advantage of each of them.

So that only leaves marketing and networking. But I do smell an opportunity here… so in the future when someone I don’t know calls me, they will be routed to a message where they can leave their credit card info prior to my callback. While I’m at it, you will also have to enter your credit card before accessing my website. I am also going to order a portable credit card machine;  before I will speak to you at a networking event, you will have to swipe.  I should also probably charge you at least $3.50 for my business card. Just think, if this were to catch on it would be easy to tell who the really important people in the room are… they’re the ones who charge $10 for a business card.

I like it! I think I can double my monitizification or monitizeration or monitizibility, you know… mo-monity.

Yeah… I will definitely sleep on this idea….

Play Audio of this Blog Post

So yesterday I attended the Temple Terrace Business Expo at the Sun Dome on behalf of SCORE. This was much better attended than I expected. We had a small table and many of the other exhibitors were small business operations that would be perfect candidates for our free counseling. After standing in front of the table for a while watching people walk by with their heads down making a beeline to the free food, I decided to walk around and introduce myself to the other exhibitors. If you have ever had to work a booth at a trade show you know that the most irritating part is smiling at someone that you think might be a prospect, only to realize they are trying to sell you something. Well, my elevator pitch started the same with everyone, “Are you familiar with SCORE?”; and the response was the same from everyone also, “no”. After the first few, I figured they just had their heads in the clouds; I mean to be a small entrepreneur and to have never heard of SCORE…are you kidding me!! But as this experience repeated over and over I came to the realization that SCORE has not done a very good job of getting the word out.

I find this astonishing, I mean think about it. Our local SCORE chapter has over 40 Counselors, all retired or semi-retired or even active business executives. Past CEOs and senior executives of huge companies, attorneys, accountants, entrepreneurs and “catch-all” guys like me, who are prepared eager to give one-on-one counseling to small business owners in exchange for nothing more than the satisfaction of seeing them succeed. I thought to myself, “What moron would not take advantage of this?”; but I guess people that don’t know about SCORE cannot be considered morons.

So I am on a mission. I want to make every entrepreneur aware of this free resource that could be the difference between success or failure of their venture. I am asking you guys to help out by letting your entrepreneur friends and clients know about SCORE and our simple mission. Just send them to www.tampascore.org; we’ll take it from there.

Thanks!

Steve

I recently signed up to become a SCORE counselor. If you don’t know, SCORE is a division of the Small Business Administration and offers free counseling to business owners, mostly start-up small businesses. It is a volunteer role and I had to commit to 16 hours a month, so I decided to cut back on my extensive exercise regimen… not sure yet where I will get the remaining 15 hrs.

I attended my first monthly meeting today with my fellow counselors and it looks like a pretty good group that sincerely wants to help small businesses. There are about 35 seemingly smart retired or semi-retired people here and it felt like there was a lot of expertise in this room. Of course there were a few blowhards, but I am pleased to report that today, I was not one of them. In fact, I didn’t say a word… I swear.

I was a little surprised at how few people seem take advantage of this service, after all it is free. But I was pleased to hear that they will be doing a lot more community outreach, so more people will understand their mission and benefits.

My first encounter with SCORE was about 30 years ago. A lot of what SCORE has historically done is advise businesses that are seeking SBA loans. As a 20 year-old entrepreneur, I too has looking for money (don’t remember why now) and I got some good advice… forget it. While they seem to have evolved beyond just explaining to business newbies why no-one in their right mind would lend them a nickel, that is still a common request.

There seemed to be a lot of emphasis on getting themselves up-to-speed on the latest business trends and technologies, after all they are mostly retired guys and times have changed a lot since some of them were last at the helm. As one of the youngest, and probably the most tech savvy of the bunch, I have a feeling they are going to keep me quite busy. Should be fun.

I will probably post occasionally about my SCORE activities, while honoring the confidentiality of the clients. As long as I maintain confidentiality, I can freely relate some of the goofiness I anticipate.