THE DEAN’S TALK -          

I’m Wavell Cowan, Dean of the Vermont Small Business Training Center. So you want your business to achieve the goals set forth on our home page? If so, you’ll find that participating in our training programs will greatly enhance the likelihood that you will in fact achieve these goals.

Two important concepts are fundamental to making our programs work for you. First, you need to understand that owner operated small businesses are a unique species of business and therefore need to function in ways quite different from large businesses. This in turn means that normal business education based, as it is, on the way large businesses operate is largely unsuitable for small business owners.

The second concept fundamental to our training programs requires that you think of your on-going business planning, as formulating experiments, and then properly running these experiments.

That’s what the Vermont Small Business Training Center programs teach – how you go about planning good experiments for your business, and how you go about creating the measurement system needed to report on how well your plans are working out. That is, once you start implementing the plan, are the predictions that are the basis of your planning experiments actually being achieved.

We provide an online group learning approach to give you the practice you need to learn how to formulate and run good experiments – those uniquely suited only for “small” businesses. Doing so vastly improves your chances of achieving the goals you have set for your business far sooner than would otherwise be the case.