This is the recorded presentation of Business Mentoring Services offered by Mike Crumbo, volunteer for the Greenwood, Indiana chapter of SCORE, a free mentoring service offered to all small business owners from startup to established brand.
Transcript
Ryan Henry
So with that, I’d like to introduce today’s speaker, Mike Crumbo, who is a volunteer mentor with SCORE, and he’s going to share with us some free services that are available to businesses. So Mike, you have the floor and you can share your screen.
Mike Crumbo
OK, I will. I’m going to talk a little bit before I share my first screen but.
Good morning again everybody, and as I told Ryan, I’ve got a three and a half hour presentation that we’ll put down to about 15 or 20 minutes here.
Let me talk a little bit about the history of SCORE. SCORE is a nonprofit organization that is in its 57th year and we consist now of a 10,000 volunteers like me who take our time to try to help people either get their business started,
Or work with people who are in business to grow that business larger or to deal with problems in the business.
And I’ve had the second time I’ve had someone approach me now about putting together an exit strategy because they’ve been in business.
For 20-30 years and they’re thinking about either selling the business, passing it along to employees, or passing it along to an heir.
And they’re wanting to make sure that they can exit the business successfully, which means that they don’t lose a whole bunch of money trying to do that.
There are the 10,000 volunteers are all across the United States and it’s broken into 320 chapters and Indianapolis is Chapter #6, formed the first year of SCORE in 1964, and there are 70 volunteers in the Indianapolis area.
In addition to our virtual headquarters, we have two branches. One is in the Anderson area and one in Johnson County, and we sort of just. There is no line of demarcation, we just sort of share that.
And there are 8 chapters throughout the State of Indiana, one in Fort Wayne, one in Michiana, a one in the Valpo area, and then others scattered around the state.
And that’s how it’s organized, and then regionally, we’re a part of a 7 state region.
And that’s just for administration. Now, having said that all the way through the Regional Vice President level, it’s a volunteer job, so nobody gets a salary for doing this. There are 21 people in Herndon, VA who actually get paid for the work that they do.
And our funding comes from the Federal Government, so we’re a line item in the budget. We answered to four committees, two in the House and two in the Senate. And so that’s sort of the accountability of what we do.
So that’s the short story of what we’re all about. Each mentor is certified, which means that there is a process that we go through annually in order to recertify or to become certified initially in what we do and how we how we work with clients.
Mentoring is not consulting. Mentoring is not doing work for a client. Mentoring is helping the client work through issues through the use of tools and our experience.
And we also, I’ll call, let me just say sign a
Ethics statement every year which includes confidentiality, it’s actually a process. It isn’t a document that you sign, it’s a process that you go through in order to recommit to the ethics clauses of SCORE.
So that’s the background. So if there aren’t any questions about that, I’ll move on to some statistics so you can kind of get a feel for the size of the organization.
So let me get my cursor moved over here.
And go to my share screen.
Uh, which I can’t find. Oh that’s interesting.
Let me do this.
I’m going to go here and I may have to do a jump.
Ryan Henry
There you go.
Mike Crumbo
Yeah, I got that up. I was looking for another screen that I have.
And I thought I had it up.
Let me see if I can do this hang on.
If I can just move to another tab here. If I can’t do that, I may come out and come back in. I wanted to.
Let me move back over here.
If that doesn’t work, we’ll I’ll fix it. Hang on for a second, be right back.
There we go.
Uh, that’s that.
Here we go.
Move that tab and we’re going to go here. So let me do this. Come back over here.
There we are. Sorry about that. I thought I had that up and floating around and it wasn’t. So we’ll go back and do that.
Here we are OK.
So sort of quickly.
Uhm, this is information from the 2019 fiscal year for SCORE. I’ve been waiting for the 2020 fiscal year, which actually ended at the end of September last year.
We’re on a government cycle, but I haven’t received it yet, so this is the latest information that I have.
During fiscal year 2019, in those twelve months, SCORE was involved with 29,681 new business foundations.
They were started at that time and they were consisted of 67,700 non-owner jobs that were created.
So these are businesses that started and they had employees.
Sort of out of the door, but their total jobs created, which would be owners and partners and employees is 97,000.
So the numbers are sort of really staggering, but you got to remember that there are 10,000 volunteers involved in the activity.
If you look at our budget, the money that we received from the Federal Government, the money that we received $394.00 of that was used to create each one of the new businesses that we created.
And if you look at the total number of employees that we created and dividing into the budget, it’s $120.00 to create one new job.
So it has impact and since you know that we’re receiving federal funds in report to form committees in Congress, you can understand that we’re data driven and the fact that we need to make sure that they don’t feel that we have wasted taxpayer money because that’s where this is coming from.
So, the point of what we do at SCORE, you know I said run with volunteer, so I volunteered my hours and efforts to try to help people, in 2019 fiscal year there were four million, almost 5,000,000 hours of volunteer time.
That was committed to the activities of SCORE, and that’s versus the 4.3 million hours that were generated in 2018. So it’s a good growth sign of what’s going on.
And those hours are represented in in the things that we do, so we served 138,500 clients in mentoring activities.
We had 225,500 attendees at our local workshops and just so you know, prior to COVID-19 we did about 50 or 60 workshops here in the Indianapolis area every year.
And then we had 169,000 people in 2019 attend our online workshops – webinars.
Because of COVID, we’ve shifted from workshops to webinars, and so we are currently generating 2 webinars a month in order to serve clients in the Indianapolis region. The whole organization is doing a lot, you know, generally just doing webinars instead of workshops now.
And in 2019.
There were 12,900 local workshops that were generated in order to assist clients.
They said there are 10,000 volunteers.
And there they
Are in 1500 different communities.
And they’re made up of helping people. And when we look at the client base that we helped, 61% of the people that we helped were women.
47% were minorities and 10% were veterans and this is during the year 2019.
So here’s the number that the committees always are interested in.
For each dollar SCORE receives from the Federal Government.
We returned almost $35 to the federal Treasury in taxes that are paid by those businesses.
So from an investment perspective, you’ll never find a number like this. You’ll be tough to find, for every dollar you invest, you get $35 back in the same year.
So the impact is more than significant to the Federal Government and the whole purpose behind this is the Federal Government wants to grow businesses in order to generate revenues.
In the final box here, 91% of the business clients that we served were in business at the end of 2019. If you consider
That half of all businesses that are started go out of business in the first five years. This number is pretty significant in in our interaction, 67% of the businesses that we help reported an increase in business revenue and 39% reported business growth.
And that can be in equity, or it can also be in profit.
So that’s the statistical side of this. Are there any questions about this?
OK.
Ryan Henry
Now that’s a pretty impressive return.
Mike Crumbo
Yeah, the return is there. I mean if you don’t if you don’t
think that that’s a significant number. It certainly is. I’m going to slip switch out here. I didn’t leave you, I’m just moving around again. I need to get back to that window where I had the website.
And switch it over.
There we go. Now I’m back with.
Uh, I think.
There I am, uhm so.
The question is, how do you do that?
And one of the ways we do it is through our website, so I’m going to share this with you because.
The website is.
It’s free, by the way, so if you go to this website IndianapolisSCORE.org, it’s in my chat box.
You too can go here and use this, so I wanted to point out some features of this that sometimes I don’t get a chance to talk about in other groups that I go to.
One is up here at the very beginning when you land on this page in this box. Here you can enter a term.
A business plan. Social media marketing, marketing, cash flow management, any of those terms and what will happen is you’ll be presented with something from the archives of SCORE. So in our 57 years, we’ve accumulated a lot of information.
I’m going to show you some of those things later, but the quick and easy way to do that is just to enter a term in this and it’ll take you to webinars, blogs, tools and workshops that we have done in the past that you can use for free.
As I mentioned this year, we in the Indianapolis Chapter started doing webinars.
And so all of our webinars are placed in our YouTube channel.
So this is the link to our YouTube channel at the top. [https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ4c7JQzH7ZCxq_e_0Bd9gw]
Uh, and if you go to that link, it’ll take you here to the SCORE Indianapolis site and so just recently we did Building Better Business Contacts.
Business insurance and talking about what you do need or might need in the insurance arena.
Uh, this is, uh, an impact of networking. You know we’re in the networking game right here, but a lot of people who are new to business don’t understand the power of networking and being able to grow.
They think word of mouth is somehow magical and it doesn’t take any work, but the networking is work right?
And then we did others. We did things on taxes and came up to the tax season and other areas. And so this is an area that that you can go to and use. These are usually.
A one to one and a half hour programs.
And you’re free to go to those. That’s the YouTube channel here at the beginning. We have a whole array of COVID-19 resources that we developed during the course of the COVID virus.
Many clients were calling us to get help with our application for disaster loans or for the Payroll Protection Plan.
Getting grants, all of the other things that were necessary for that, and that’s still ongoing. You know the new PPP program is out.
And so that’s all happening now.
Uh, if you want to go through the workshops that we have generated. These are workshop items.
You can click in this area and this will take you to workshops that we have done. Now this is just a cold drop of the workshops that are there.
Some of them are coming up as an example we have for those of you who are en Español, we have a April 22nd simple steps for starting your business.
Introductory course in Spanish.
We have some conferences about starting up success. It’s a wide range. Here again, if you go to the search box here and you put in a term, it will bring up workshops that are related to that subject matter.
So that’s handy if you want to kind of zoom in on the area of workshops.
Obviously we have our success stories that we love sharing.
Moving farther down, we’re always looking for volunteers because it’s a volunteer organization and because almost all of the volunteers that we have come from a long business background.
We have a fair amount of turnover where the more senior mentors are deciding to retire and retire, and we’re always looking for new people but wanting to make sure we keep a wide range of skill sets.
And so we’re always looking for new volunteers. So and I didn’t say in my introduction book, but if you know somebody who thinks this might be a good way for them to give back to the community and to and to spend some time and be challenged, you know, give them my contact information. I’d sure love to talk to them.
These are area total resources for COVID-19 and we’re always asking for extra money because the government is generous in giving us the money that we need.
But there’s always an additional cost that we need to make sure that we come, so we get. We have a series of sponsors.
And partners that work with us and they help us get a lot of the programs off the ground.
And then of course you can always ask for a mentor.
And then one of the other things that I think
Is an important and interesting, our checklists.
This is relatively new. It’s been consolidated into one area. Here again, you can go to the search box and you can check on the item that you’re interested in, but these are checklist formats and it’s like how to reopen your business. Depending on the kind of business you had, if you were shut down during COVID.
A crisis communication how to plan for crisis in the future. You know one of the reasons you have a business plan is risk assessment.
And So what is it that you need to be prepared to do in the case of a crisis?
Uh event plannings? minimizing risk?
Checklist for getting license and permits for a restaurant and on, right. The checklist is quite interesting. It’s worth your time to go in and see what’s available or to use the search box in order to find what those are.
And then finally at the bottom of the landing page are upcoming events, which at this point is not filled in.
The earlier webinar about simple steps for starting your business en Español will be employed into this area and you can check back here as those webinars are published.
For registration. You can come back here to do that.
There are ways to sign up for a workshop. This will take you to the SCORE main website where you can select the webinars that are being offered across the United States and so you don’t have to be limited. I’ll say by what we’re doing here.
You can browse the library to find tools and webinars and other subjects so you can come here and you can see what it’s just landed here.
SCOREs local Resources, USA TODAY small business budget help article and those and here again is another search box so you can put in the idea or item that you’re wanting to search.
Uh, and be able to do that.
So that’s the website.
So I’m going to pull any questions about the website.
And here again, I just suggest that you.
Take a look at that, and, uh.
If you have a question you’ve got my phone number and my email address. I’d be glad to help you.
You know, work your way through that. You don’t even have to become a client if you just want to use that that free resource.
And I’m going to finish up with a tool.
That I particularly like and have used quite a bit.
And this is the SCORE.
Marketing Cook Book.
This is a obviously in PDF, right, and?
It’s about 75 pages. If you’d printed, I actually had a client do that one time because he wasn’t comfortable using his computer, so he printed the whole document. I think he ran out of ink twice while he was going through and doing that.
Oh whoops, let me.
There we go.
I’m going to go to my screen, it’s easier.
This is the index.
OK, and I’m going to put my glasses on because I’m too close to this. Developing your marketing strategy, promoting your products and services and online marketing are the major sections of this. OK and then community outreach.
So it’s it’s a step by step, uhm?
Well, I had one client not the same one who printed it, but one client who read it like a novel.
This is a reference piece.
It’s really for those elements of marketing that you are wanting help to improve or assistance to be able to move ahead using the tools in the area. Obviously online marketing is sort of a big area of interest.
But I wanted to, I’m just going to show you one of the cook book ingredients now.
This is the first one. It’s conducting marketing research.
And so it’s a set. You know, it talks about the fact that this is essential for your business. You need to let people know what the problem is that you’re solving.
So it’s just the statement of your value proposition you know, along with research that you need to do in order to determine who your clients are, what, how they buy and all of those issues. So it is a.
Cookbook right, so here’s the list of ingredients.
And that’s conducting a market analysis, so this is a hot link to a marketing analysis workshop. That SCORE is done how to research a new business idea.
Parts one and two. Here again, these are workshops that we’ve done in the past and they’re available to you. You just click on the link.
And then important for gathering information our research tools. So one is just a reference that says find out who’s your trade association and the business that you’re in because they can provide you with tons of information. the US Census Bureau, another hot link, American Fact Finder.
And then the economic indicators at the government level. Federal statistics, National Bureau of Research, et cetera. Harris tells you all about businesses, right? Thomas?
So those are all available in. It’s a part of understanding what the ingredients are that you have, and then the directions say OK. Review these online courses.
Perform the steps that are outlined in how to research a new business idea, and then it takes you through step by step what you need to do and it says when you’re done, the knowledge of your proposed market or size habits.
Markets, size, habits, location and demographics will help you develop your effective marketing strategies and then it moves on to identifying your target market. Same format, right ingredients and directions.
This is sort of like you need to have it sitting there on your computer so that it’s available.
To grab when you need it, it’s a part of the whole strategic effort of marketing the business and I’m going to come out of this right now, but.
A lot of what happens when people begin a business is that they.
Have a grand knowledge.
Of their process or the product that they’re making.
But they have little understanding of how to sell that or to market it to the clients that they have.
And so sort of like if you wanted to start an accounting business, you would have majored in accounting, right?
But if you’re trying to start a business making widgets, accounting as one of the lesser things. That’s somehow how marketing often ends up, it’s an area that is.
Often not well understood and because of that it becomes a problem for the client. So this is a way to help them through that.
Now when I say tools and when I show you the website, you’re certainly free to use all of those. When we’re dealing with a client.
We’ll deal with them on a step by step basis.
So we give homework.
Unlike a consultant who comes in and asks you what time it is and when you look at your watch, they take your watch and leave.
We are there to be with you for the life of your business. So when we meet with a client, we’ll give them homework to do.
It maybe research and maybe reading one of these sections and then we’ll come back and talk about it and how they can effectively apply it to what they’re trying to do.
And all of these steps that we go through, whether it’s a three-year financial projection.
Whether it’s dealing with how to find and maintain employees, whether it’s dealing with a problem, whether it’s trying to get through the CARES Act, and the COVID shutdown, we’re there, step by step with them.
So that’s a quick and dirty overview of the tools that are available, and then what we do. So I’m open for questions if you have.
And I’ll stop talking.
Attendee
I have a couple questions. Uhm, well, first of all, I really liked the statistic that like 60 plus percent of the clients you have are female, cause in my area up in Fort Wayne, less than 6% of entrepreneurs are female, the rest are male.
Mike Crumbo
Oh wow.
Attendee
Ah yeah, it’s really bad. Yeah, but then also. Uh, what’s the matching system like mentor to client? What’s that process like top to bottom?
Mike Crumbo
Ah well, it depends. I sort of a rainmaker. I sort of find my own clients because I network with a lot of people and so we kind of match up. Now let me say.
My background is in operations management in manufacturing OK. International manufacturing, and so I have a good basic skill of being able to start somebody out and if you need to start a business I can take you through that process of how to do it.
If we get into something that is more complicated,
Or more directly related to the skill set required to do their particular business, I can reach out to all ten thousand, 9999 other mentors in the United States and bring someone in who has that skill set.
And I have done that. OK, I have uh oh, one of the things I didn’t mention so and that’s a prelude to what I’m going to tell you, is we also work with nonprofit organizations. There aren’t any other organizations similar to us.
Not SBDC, not the Business Ownership Initiative or any of those that will work with nonprofit organizations. But we do. So I had a nonprofit client in Indianapolis who needed a grant writer.
To help them put together a grant writing strategy, right, a grant writer’s job description.
And you know, put together that process. Well, I checked at the time we had 60 some members in the central IN area.
There was no one in my chapter that had that skill set, so I reached out and I found a person who was in the Terre Haute chapter who was in fact a grant writer for her career.
And so I connected the client that I had in Indianapolis to the mentor who was in Terre Haute.
And they worked on putting that program together. I just turned him over to them because I didn’t necessarily need to be in the loop on that and I had just been slowing it down. So that’s one. I have a client who owns a restaurant.
And I worked with her for two years as she got going and got the restaurant running. And I’m an old army cook, right?
So I could talk about presentation and cleanliness and portion control and waste reduction and you name it right and what? How many degrees you need to fry an egg. But the point was she needed some things beyond that.
Right?
Uh and so, another mentor in the Carmel area here in my same chapter, had spent 35 years doing consulting work with restaurants and hotels and motels.
And so I contacted him and he said he would be glad to help her. One of the benefits is every time we meet with a client, we write up the notes from our meeting. So Drew, who’s the person I contacted, read through the two years of notes that I had.
Of the meetings with my client and we met at her restaurant.
And when we were sitting there drinking our coffee, he said, OK, well, I understand how you got started so we didn’t have to do 20 questions. And then he started handing her things that she needed to be working on.
So he was able to just. It’s a seamless move and that’s and that’s why we are copious note takers.
So that so we can reach out either in our own local chapters or across the nation and find someone with the skill set required.
And I’m always happy to have my I don’t mean this in any bad way. I’m always happy to have a woman who wants to try to start a business because I find them to have done far more research by the time they got to me than anybody else. I mean I had a I have a couple of clients.
It’s a partnership, right? And they started a business.
And they, when I when I was working with them, they were doing research on where to locate the business.
It’s a brick and mortar business, right? And they told me about the buying patterns of people in Johnson County and southern Marion County.
And they said, I think we’re going to put it in Greenwood because we can’t get any of the people on the West side of Johnson County to cross State Road 135 and buy anything but people in Franklin Township in Indianapolis will drive 15 miles for something that they want.
And Greenwood is the right location for the people that we need to be attracting. And they’re still in business. And that was five years ago.
You know, so they do the kind of research and planning and they’re not afraid to do the homework.
And I think guys are just, you know, just like me. You know we’re ready to bumble ahead and do stuff without enough planning. And so I like the fact that they’re really good planners.
You know everything is, uh, there are always exceptions to every rule, right? But generally speaking they are true and I would say that our experience.
Locally, in Indianapolis tends to be closer to the national average of the breakdown of veterans and.
And minorities and female business owners.
Ryan Henry
Does anyone have any other questions for Mike?
Ryan Henry
All right, well, let’s give Mike a hand for his presentation today.
