SCORE News

Many in the nationwide network of SCORE Association volunteers, more than 12,000 retired business leaders, like to boast about the long history of companies they helped start and jobs they helped create.

That success, including 20,000 new businesses counseled annually since 1964, doesn’t only stem from helping would-be entrepreneurs with what to do. The group’s volunteers, says CEO W. Kenneth Yancey, also excels at helping clients with what not to do.

The New England Independent Booksellers Association couldn’t have chosen better timing for the workshop on “Planning Your Bookstore’s Next Chapter,” just one day after nine-year-old Porter Square Books in Cambridge, Mass., announced that was putting itself up for sale.  Close to 40 booksellers attended the workshop led by Donna Paz Kaufman and Mark Kaufman of Paz & Associates at the Biltmore Hotel in Providence, R.I., on March 12.

Surcees is a distinctly Southern word that means “wonderful surprise.”  And that’s exactly what Surcees Vintage Clothing and Handmade Gifts in Surfside Beach is.  Owner Erin Adams says the vintage clothes “have lived and loved” and now need to be passed on to the next person who’ll treasure them.

Her natural gift for merchandising and marketing helps. So does the SCORE workshop she took to hone those skills.

Cass Cannon is an entrepreneur. She’s followed her heart—plus gone into a lot of research and training—to start her own new business, “Peg’s Salt.”

She learned about what she was getting into before jumping off the new business cliff. “A year ago I went to SCORE,” a nonprofit association of volunteer business counselors throughout the U.S. with offices in Waynesboro and Charlottesville. Then she filled out the incorporation papers online. “Doing Peg’s Salt was like a no brainer,” Cannon said.