Free stuff for entrepreneurs

Last week was chock full of marketing, business finances and networking.

Here's the highlights:
Monday I visited the NYC Business Solutions office in downtown Manhattan. The center aids entrepreneurs by offering workshops and one-on-one counseling - for free! Its manager, Karen-Michelle Mirko, was super helpful with tips on branding and on increasing the traffic on my blog. She even came up with a contact for me to speak to about an idea I have for a reality TV show! So lots of resources there - I highly recommend checking them out. Karen-Michelle will be on maternity leave starting at the end of June but she introduced me to Elli Papadopoulos (212-618-8817), who will be taking over while she's gone, but there's also other female counselors available as well. It's great to have women helping women, which is the new tag line I came up with for the Mogulettes: women helping women achieve success - I'm still working on it but what do you think? Let me know!

On Tuesday at our weekly meeting we had Marina Aris, a financial consultant from Ameriprise Financial talk to us about business finances. We had a great turnout from the Mogulettes at the presentation and I was able to meet three new members. Afterwards we mingled and exchanged ideas. Someone suggested I bring a tax accountant to one of our meetings, so if any of you know of a good one, please let me know! Another suggestion I got was to do a teleconference, so that we can hold the meeting from the comfort of our homes. I'll keep you posted on that! One of the topics Marina covered was fixing your credit before asking for a loan. Here's two free upcoming seminars I found that deal specifically with that:

Credit Readiness

Sponsor: NYC Business Solutions, along with Greenpath Credit Counselors
Date: Wedn., June 6th
Time: 3:00pm to 5:00pm
Location: Lower Manhattan Business Solutions Center
79 John Street, b/t William & Gold Sts.
4th floor conference room
Cost: Free

RSVP: Call 311 and ask for small business seminars

************************************** ********
What Every Woman Needs to Know About Credit

Sponsor: ACCION New York
Date: 06/06/2007
Time: 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Series Title: Save, Strengthen and Succeed! Financial Literacy Tips for Real Women
Location: Baruch College, Field Center for Entrepreneurship, 55 Lexington Ave./ Rm 2104
Cost: FREE
Description: Accion invites you to participate in this evening seminar and join ACCION's credit experts, local politicians, community leaders, and the Allstate Foundation in this kick-off workshop that will provide all the knowledge you need to read your credit report, build a healthy credit history, and more!
Registration Information: To register call (212) 387-0494.

If you can't make these they're offered periodically so check this calendar for future dates.

Does the idea of getting free money for your business appeal to you? It sure did to me, and that's why I made my way over to the Science, Industry and Business Library to attend a seminar by the same name, held by the Queens Economic Development Corp. It was all about grants for small businesses - where to find them, how to apply for them and what you need to qualify for them. They're free but you have to put together an application as well as a business plan to qualify for them. Here's a few places to find more info:

• www.grants.gov for federal government grants
• Idea Cafe's Biz Center for a list of private grants
• Avon Hello Tomorrow Fund to find grants for women
• The Foundation Center for links to grant maker websites
  

They also touched on business plan competitions, which are sometimes easier to obtain than grants. A quick google search for "business plan competition" + 2007 resulted in one for entrepreneurs 45 years old plus, one from Fortune Small Business for all ages, and one for women 35 years old or younger. There's also a lot of contests sponsored by universities for students but you can overcome these limitations by having someone on your team that fits their criteria.

Thursday and Friday I attended a conference on personal finance for Hispanic journalists sponsored by International Center for Journalists held at the McGraw-Hill headquarters, home of BusinessWeek and Standard & Poor's. One fellow writer I met there was Xavier Serbia, who has a website with lots of great articles on managing your money in Spanish and is very committed to getting the Latino community educated about their finances.

Pheww! It makes me tired just thinking about all the stuff I did last week. At our next meeting we'll be learning how to give our businesses a big push from two business coaches. How will they do that? Check back and find out!

Marketing Allongé

One of the biggest hurdles I face in moving forward with my small enterprise is thinking that I'll be crushed by all the competition that's out there, and that my idea isn't original enough.

But here's the thing - Olimpia's idea for a dance school wasn't original - there's so many of them everywhere. She did, however, have a secret weapon: herself. Her 15 years plus of experience teaching and performing (see her bio here) gave her the know-how to offer a high level of course offerings and instruction, and that gave her an edge.

By bringing our unique background and abilities to our endeavors, we make them different from what others are offering. The key is to focus on our strengths. Like these female entrepreneurs that won the 2006 "Make Mine A Million" contest. We've seen most of these businesses before: dogwalker, jewelry maker, baker, vineyard operator, professional staffer. I'm pretty sure that they chose their particular field because they were passionate about it - that's what gives us the drive we need to execute our visions.

Getting the word out
But back to Luis and Olimpia. As the deadline for the first day of operations loomed, the two fledgling entrepreneurs racked their brains for ways to spread the word about their school. They had put together beautiful brochures and needed to come up with a creative way to get them in people's hands. They took a multi-pronged approach: first they figured that kids like to eat pizza so they found a local pizzeria and convinced them to include a brochure with every pizza delivery in exchange for an ad in the back of the brochure. Secondly they placed stacks of brochures in stores that catered to kids: clothing, shoes, pet stores, ice cream parlors. Olimpia also hit the pavement and visited all the private and public schools in the area handing out brochures herself, and finally on weekends she stood at a busy intersection near the school and attracted kids by giving away balloons - an brochures of course! They ran a promotion giving away the first two classes for free to whoever brought in a brochure. That's how they were able to measure what marketing method was working best. On the back of each brochure was a little mark indicating how it was marketed. In the end, they found that the ones that worked best were the handouts at the schools and on the street, so they stopped using the pizzeria. After the free classes a total of 3 girls had signed up - they were in business! Now it's one and a half years later and Allongé Dance Center has a total of 36 students...and growing!

Anatomy of a Startup: Allongé Dance Center

We recently had two full-fledged entrepreneurs (as opposed to aspiring, as most of us are still…) come visit our ever expanding Mogulettes meeting (we now have 36 members!) to share how they got started. Olimpia Hernández and Luis Blanco launched the Allongé Dance Center almost two years ago. Here are a few highlights of their story.

Trained as a dancer since she was a child, Olimpia had been dreaming of opening a dance studio for a long time. She had actually tried to do it on her own in the past but it hadn’t worked out. Then she met Luis, who has a background in finances, and decided to ask him to be her partner. From a business perspective, they complemented each other quite well. Luis could focus on doing the numbers-crunching and researching their target market, while Olimpia's expertise as a dancer and instructor would help them formulate the curriculum for the school, and give them a competitive advantage.

Luis and Olimpia share their startup secrets














Once Luis agreed to come on board, they decided to set a start date - that way they had a deadline to work towards. They gave themselves 9 months to prepare and immediately started looking at possible locations for the school. Their target market was parents with enough disposable income to pay for their children to attend dance classes, so they went into the census website and searched for neighborhoods with annual household incomes of $80,000. After that, they checked to see if there were any cultural or religious components to the area that might make a dance school unpopular with its residents. Competition was also a consideration, so they looked for places that didn’t have a lot of other studios operating there. Forest Hills, Queens, was their eventual choice. They even found a space that had just been vacated and had previously housed a dance studio.

With a little help from your friends
Luis quickly sat down and made some projections of how much they would need to "set up shop". He calculated it would cost $20,000 to renovate and rent the space for the first three months of operations. That was a huge chunk of change, especially since they didn't have it! They would also be losing money when the space wasn't being used, which would probably be most of the time at the beginning. But what else could they do?

Olimpia was able to find help in an unlikely place: she asked none other than her old boss for advice, who came up with a much cheaper alternative. He owned a dance school in Westchester where she had been teaching classes, and since she planned to open a studio in another county, she knew he wouldn't feel threatened. He suggested they do what he did when he started out: find a space they could rent by the hour, and only pay for the amount of time they needed it. Brilliant! (Another reason why we need mentors: to avoid costly mistakes!)

Howdy partner!
So they switched gears and looked into health clubs, karate schools and other options, until they found a yoga studio nearby that fit their requirements: a hardwood floor and a few open slots of time in the afternoons. However, when they got down to negotiating the rent, the owners wanted too much. So Olimpia and Luis came up with the idea of partnering up with the "yogis". They offered to give them a percentage of their profits in exchange for paying less rent, and the deal was sealed. Another hurdle overcome!

Coming up next: How Allongé found low cost ways to advertise

Business therapy and financial blueprints

Looking for a little guidance, I paid a visit to SCORE last week to see what they had to offer. Mel Howard is one of the 50 retired executives in the New York Metro area that give free advice to entrepreneurs wanting to start or launch their businesses. He listened attentively to my idea and suggested a few simple steps to get me started. It was like getting free therapy for my business! Unfortunately he says that 90% of the people that visit them never come back... They have counselors that specialize in real estate, personal consulting, finance, banking, international trade, retail, manufacturing, apparel, accounting, pharmaceuticals, marketing, advertising, public relations, computer business systems, taxes, engineering and construction, transportation, electronics - and you can request to speak with whoever the expert is in the field you're interested in. These guys have actually owned these types of businesses, and I'll probably be needing help in a lot of those areas, so I'll definitely be back. And they can also act as mentors (see Why you need a Mentor).

Me and a couple of the Mogulettes also attended T. Harv Eker's seminar last week. I was a little disappointed that Eker never showed up and sent one of his lead facilitators in his place. But still I got a lot of out it, like (and I'm paraphrasing) the difference between rich people and poor people is that rich people feel the same fear and self-doubt that poor people do but they take actions anyway... and we all have problems and we will continue to have problems - the key is to grow bigger than our problems, so they'll seem small. It's all about changing my financial blueprint, which right now is set to thinking small. Here's to aiming high!!

Existential angst

Who would have thought that defining our dreams would be so gut wrenching? My throat tightened as I recited my proposed mission statement at our second meeting. The words “what I want to do is…” brought up so much fear and dread in the pit of my stomach! It’s that voice inside my head that says, “Who do you think you are? You can’t do that!” Luckily my fellow Mogulettes set me straight with fabulous encouragement and support.

We were still not 100% clear about what our missions were by the end of the session, so I suggested that we each come up with 10 ways we can bring in income, without judging or striking out anything that seems too wacky or far fetched. I later found another suggestion from “The Girl’s Guide to Starting your Own Business”, which recommends making a list of values for your company, narrowing them down to a few core values and then formulating your mission from that.

Here’s a sampling of mission statements I gathered from various websites:
Starbucks:
Establish Starbucks as the premier purveyor of the finest coffee in the world while maintaining our uncompromising principles while we grow.
The Gap:
Gap Inc. is a brand-builder. We create emotional connections with customers around the world through inspiring product design, unique store experiences and compelling marketing.
Yahoo!:
To connect people to their passions, their communities and the world’s knowledge.

More mission statements from Man on a Mission .

The whole process of thinking about my business brings up many more questions than the Mogulettes can answer, so another assignment we’re going to work on for next time is to find a mentor -a man or a woman that's successful in our particular field of interest and who might be willing to guide us. Related articles at StartupNation.com: How to find Business Mentor and Businessweek: Why You Need a Mentor.

Homework:
-List 10 things you can do to bring in income
-Look for a mentor
-Polish up your mission statement

Here are some more questions from the SBA website that we need to ask ourselves regarding our particular niche: (see full text here)

-Is my idea practical and will it fill a need?
-What is my competition?
-What is my business advantage over existing firms?
-Can I deliver a better quality service?
-Can I create a demand for my business?

The final step before developing our plan is the pre-business checklist:

-What business am I interested in starting?
-What services or products will I sell? Where will I be located?
-What skills and experience do I bring to the business?
-What will be my legal structure?
-What will I name my business?
-What equipment or supplies will I need?
-What insurance coverage will be needed?
-What financing will I need?
-What are my resources?
-How will I compensate myself?

"If you’re not following your heart, you’re living someone else’s dream."
Lyn Christian