Business: Places for Help
Posted by Philippe on October 17, 2006
Finding help in business is difficult. Generally, you’re lucky if you know someone that can be a mentor to you. Places such as SCORE help for single questions, but are rarely the long term assistance that you need. More often than not, the people that are involved in SCORE are very busy and have other responsibilities — they can not hand hold you through everything.
To help with this, a few communities have been created. When I started one of my own companies a while ago, I started looking for places that could offer this assistance. Most are dead and unused. The most active one that I have found is currently “Small Business Forums“. There’s about 20-25 people who regularly seem to respond to postings and, generally, they appear to have a clue.
Because of the lack of centralization, I created one myself. This one is very heavily in development, but we’re open to allowing people on board. Its called “Small Business Development” and entails articles, whitepapers, and forums — and an online real time community. I’m hoping to actually launch it by January 1, 2007 and have more articles and whitepapers available for review.
chaosrunner said
Perhaps your greatest strength and weakness is your diversification. You’ve got so many things going on that you’re not able to devote the sort of energy to one thing in order to make it really spectacular. On the other hand, you have so many things going on that even if one or two fall through, you have other things to tide you over. I think it’s a matter of finding a happy medium between the two states.
Philippe said
When I find one thing that can make me spectacularly wealthy and/or happy, I’ll concentrate on that one thing! In all seriousnes, however, this is definately a known strength and weakness that I have. I’m an excellent visionary and executor of the initial stages, but sometimes falter as things don’t develop fast enough for my personal happinesss and financial stability.