The Management Training Crap-Shoot
Mar 17th, 2008 | By Dawn R. Rivers | Category: OperationsPerhaps one of the most important services that microbusiness owners need, and often don’t get, is business management training. That is unfortunate, because the SBA’s training resource partners — the Small Business Development Centers, the Women’s Business Centers and the SCORE volunteers — offer world-class small business management training, at little or no direct cost to the business owner. As generally excellent as all the SBA entrepreneurial development programs are, they do not operate the same say that Starbucks does, trying to create an identical customer experience in each of their thousands of locations. That translates into uneven service delivery; a microbusiness owner might wind up sitting across the counseling table from a provider who completely understands and respects the microbusiness way of growth, or they might just as easily wind up with a counselor who dismisses what they do as a “hobby.” Counselors who insist on trying to remake a microbusiness into something he or she recognizes as a small business will probably end up chasing their microbusiness client away. And that’s not helpful for anybody.
