Small Business Counseling One of the free services that Silicon Valley SCORE offers is Small Business Counseling. How does this work? Our chapter has about 50 experienced executives that have owned or helped to run businesses. These businesses ranged in size from small retail to large international. Our executives bring a variety of disciplines, skills and experiences. Your first Small Business? If you have never owned a business and are thinking about starting one, we recommend that you take some of our workshops or seminars first. A good one to start with is Small Business Workshop for Startups and Existing Businesses. After you take the workshops and/or seminars, you can start to sketch out your business plan.  While doing so, you may find a few issues that you'd like help on.  Counseling is the next step. Counseling Counseling is free and offered to people with an existing small business, or to people looking to start or buy a small business. A one hour counseling session lets you talk to two of our executives. We find that having two executives helps to offer a variety of opinions and a deeper analysis of the issues at hand. We find that counseling sessions tend to work best when specific questions are asked. We generally recommend that you jot down a few key questions. Questions can cover a variety of topics and issues, including: Evaluating a new business idea or strategy Help with business plan specifics (it helps to bring in your draft business plan) Market analysis, research and segmentation Sales, customer acquisition, advertising Effective use of the Internet Accounting and financing issues Personnel and management issues Production and quality issues We encourage people to come back for more free counseling to check up on progress or cover other topics and issues that may pop up. We hold our counseling sessions on most business days. Sessions generally start at 9:30am, 10:30am, 11:30am and 12:30am. Most of the counseling takes place in our main San Jose office in the Entrepreneur Center at 84 W. Santa Clara Street. To make an appointment, you just need to call (408) 288-8479 during business hours, or send us a note at info@svscore.org. For convenience, we also hold sessions at most Chamber of Commerce offices. To make appointments at a these offices, call your Chamber of Commerce directly.  Visit www.svscore.org for contact numbers. Mentoring We also conduct counseling onsite at your place of business. We call this Existing Business Mentoring. Mentoring allows us to dive deeper into a business and give advice on a variety of issues. Often times issues are identified that may not be obvious to the business owner. If you would like an idea of how Mentoring works, read some of our Success Stories.