Your Own Business Support Group

A solo consulting business can be a lonely venture. Family and friends can’t offer much support because they usually don’t have a feel for the issues and challenges you’re facing. RPCN offers large group networking, learning, and mutual support that can help combat your isolation and build camaraderie. But, beyond RPCN, you could consider forming your own Business Support Group. A small team of trusted associates can offer many benefits and options.

Small Support Group Benefits

• A more personal form of mutual support and advice from people you know and trust
• Deep dives into your pressing issues
• Learning from each other
• Self Accountability (You define business action items and “by when” dates and the group asks, “How are you doing against your action items?”)
• Closer camaraderie in a small group

Support Group Structure
Your support group meetings should have at least:

• Discussion topics, such as “Who asks what?” to generate the group’s responses.
• A meeting style set up, such as Forum style, Forum style plus short, informative presentation, or Other.
• A skilled facilitator on hand to manage the discussion and to maintain respect for the participants’ vulnerability.
• A regular meeting date, time, and place decided. For example, is it once per week, in-person, or online using Zoom or another tool?
• Ensure there are time limits too so that everyone has a chance to get feedback and support.

Build Your Own Group or Join Someone Else’s?
If you think that forming your own support group is beyond your capability, you could find an existing group to join. Ask around, search online, look on social media, and so on. You could give other groups a try to see if they’re a good fit for you.

The key task is to go forth and get support. Combat the isolation of your one-person business.

RPCN Technical Forum

As mentioned in last month’s newsletter, we’ve made a minor change to the Tech Forum starting with the August Tech Forum. The Tech Forum’s primary focus of helping our members and guests get answers to their technology questions has not changed, but we thought we might make the Tech Forum a more valuable resource to our members and guests with some tweaks to it.

June Tech Forum Brainstorming
To give some background, we ended the June Tech Forum with a brainstorming session for ideas on how we might add to it or change it. Some of the ideas that were brought up for consideration were:

• Starting the forum with a short update on technology in the news
• Including an “Our Technology Adventures” segment where our participants talk about the tech they’ve recently started using and what they love about it
• Having a program for the 2nd half of the forum
• Having an occasional full session program about a particular technology related topic
• Giving individuals an opportunity to submit topics to cover prior to the meeting, and then advertising the pre-selected topics to discuss
• Continuing or resuming the practice of publishing to the RPCN website the questions that were answered in the Tech Forum
• Including a segment where our participants can tell us about the cheats, or life hacks, they’ve come up with to make the tech they use even more effective for them
• Having a “look back in time” segment where we talk about the technology we were using five, 10, 20, or so years ago and see just how far things have come in a fairly short time
• Having a theme in a particular month; for example, one month the focus is on phone related issues, another it is on laptop/desktop related issues, and another the focus is on a particular type of software; or perhaps discuss the pros and cons of a particular phone provider (say Verizon) one month and then a different one (say T-Mobile) the next month, and so on.  

August Tech Forum Ideas
For the August Tech Forum, we added an “Our Technology Adventures” segment for the final 20 minutes or so of the Forum. It seemed to go over well.

• We heard about high tech stud finders, brushes with AI – literally, we talked about an AI Toothbrush, and also writing articles in AI using tools such as Buzz and Chat GPT.
• We also discussed a neat tool called the Fire Toolbox that removes bloatware from Kindle Fires.
• It ended up a fun discussion, so we plan to implement it again in September, so come to the meeting to discuss some cool stuff you’ve started using or to hear about some cool stuff others have started using.

This new format is more free form than the normal Tech Forum or Business Forum. This is fun and we hope it continues to be fun. In the future, we’ll likely try other ideas, but this idea worked pretty well so we’d like to try it again.

If you can only stay for the part of the Forum when we’re discussing Technology-related questions, that’s fine. If you can only join us for Our Technology Adventures, that’ll work too. We’d love to have you for the full meeting, including the time set aside until 10AM for individualized networking in our breakout rooms or in the Justin Vigdor meeting room at the Al Sigl Center. You can even come just for the networking, which typically starts just after 9:30AM.

Our goal for the Tech Forum is to make this program as beneficial to our members and guests as possible.

Whether you attended the August 2nd Forum, or plan to attend on September 6th, we’d love to get your thoughts about the Tech Forum and how to build on what we’ve had in it the past 30 years. Please send them to this email: TechForum@rochesterconsultants.org. 

—Dave Bassett

RPCN Needs Simon Vision Mentors for Fall 2024

The Rochester Professional Consultants Network’s (RPCN) program of providing mentors to the University of Rochester’s Simon School of Business (Simon) Simon Vision Consulting Program (Simon Vision) is preparing to provide mentors for a fourteenth consecutive semester.

For those of you that regularly read this column, you already know about Simon Vision and what a great opportunity it is. For those of you that are unfamiliar with Simon Vision, the program is an effort to increase experiential learning opportunities for Simon’s MBA and MS students. It is a student-run program that usually has 4-5 student members per team. Each team typically provides consulting to a local small business for 8 - 12 weeks, which is one semester. In the semester that follows, Simon sometimes has another student consulting team take over the next part of the project for the same company.

Participation in the program is voluntary for the students and is not part of the regular Simon curriculum. In addition to the RPCN mentors, there is a faculty adviser who helps the students run the program.

Mentors
It’s time for us to provide mentors for the upcoming Fall semester. We’re expecting there to be 12-16 projects in total. We would like to have at least that many mentors to help. If you’d like to become a mentor, please contact me at the contact information shown at the end of this article.

Projects
Simon is also in the vetting stage for new projects for the Fall semester.

• If you, a client, or an associate, have submitted an application to have Simon Vision provide consulting for an outsourceable project that could be completed in about 8 – 10 weeks, you should be hearing from Simon Vision soon to see if your project made the cut this semester.
• Projects are vetted by the Simon Vision student governing board and the leadership of Simon Vision will work with you to define a project that to be completed within these constraints.
• If your project isn’t selected for inclusion in the Fall semester, or if you have an idea for a project but didn’t get an application in, don’t lose heart. Your project could be accepted in the Spring semester.

Presentation on September 13th, 2024
The new President of Simon Vision, Fadekemi Akindude, and one of the program Directors, Julian Edelman, will give a presentation about the upcoming semester on September 13th at a “Learn from the Best” Friday morning meeting. It’ll be a great opportunity to learn about the program if you’re thinking of becoming a mentor and can also give you a good expectation of what’s to come in the current semester if you or a client of yours has signed on to become an SVC client. It should also give you some ideas of what they could work on for YOU in a future semester.

Contact Information
If you are interested in having an SVC Project Team perform work for you, would like more information about the program, or if you’d like to volunteer to be an RPCN member mentor to a student team, please contact Dave Bassett at dbassett@basstat.com.

—Dave Bassett