Educational Offerings:

If current business education is largely useless for those of us who run our own small businesses, what kind of business education would be useful? It took many years and many trials before I and my colleagues in the Vermont Small Business Network came up with a satisfactory answer. All of us ran our own small businesses, and had been for many years. What is it we had learned over these years, we wondered, that if taught to us early on, would have greatly shortened out learning curves? A focus on that question over a period of some fifteen years, eventually led us to the small business education approach now updated and offered by the School of Small Business Practice.

An important reason why all of us had started our own small businesses was that we wanted to be the boss, to do things our own way. With this in mind, our educational approach explored basic questions, leaving students to develop their own answers. We realized that early on we had not fully understood all these questions where good answers were needed for our businesses to operate successfully, and it was that lack of understanding that was our basic problem. To articulate and thoroughly understand these questions therefore became our educational focus. This set us on the right track.

Over the years we came up with basic questions related to planning how revenues were to be generated and how costs were to be constrained. We looked at these through the optics of a different business paradigm – “satisfy people/grow better”, not “make money/grow bigger.” We developed an array of materials providing background and ideas to ensure that the nature and importance of these basic questions would be understood and appreciated. We then developed a group learning approach whereby a number of small business people independently studied these materials, developed their own answers to each basic question, then shared and discussed these answers with each other in a group setting.

The final education piece needed, was to come up with the simplified form of financial management essential to small businesses if they are to “know” how well their operational plans are actually working out. Case studies were developed to illuminate and provide practice in what small businesses need to know and understand about budgeting and accounting to properly run these “experiments” that inform how well things are going. This underlines the importance of good experiments properly run to reliably and in a timely manner sort out what works from what doesn’t. In this way small businesses receive the input needed to promote rethinking when results fail to meet predictions. This ensures a continuous improvement in their performance and their competitiveness. It is how small businesses continually “grow better”.

These are the things that collectively we realized were important to our success. Articulating them and setting them into an educational context was no easy matter. Now, successfully adapted by the School of Small Business Practice for on-line learning, these have become educational tours that will jump start any small business start-up, and also inspire any mature small business to greatly improve its competitiveness.

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