Business Training Like No Other

My professional lifetime has been immersed in the operation of my own small businesses while dealing primarily with clients and customers in the large business sector. Many practices I came to embrace empirically I later realized had fundamental value.

Many years of trial and error and much subsequent analytic thinking were required to identify all these practices. However, most of these were feasible only because my business was small. It is therefore not surprising that these practices are never identified in typical business courses or in the business literature.

Business literature and business courses flow from the academic study of “large” businesses. The result is that few of these ideas are directly applicable to a small business operation and they never deal with important practices relevant only to small businesses.

I came to this realization as a consequence of a fifteen year involvement with the Vermont Small Business Network seeking to understand what were the “real” educational needs of people like myself who operate their own “small” businesses. Over this period as I explored this question, I had discussions with hundreds of Vermont small business owners. Ideas developed over this period became the subjects for evolving small business education courses.

These ultimately became the low cost specialized training programs made possible using an online group learning approach. This is the training that I realized would have been most valuable to me in my early years. It was unavailable then. Only now is this training, uniquely valuable only to small business entrepreneurs, available through the Vermont Small Business Training Center.