The expertise and advice routinely shared by business men and women engaged in the SCORE Chapter serving Michigan’s Great Southwest has helped all sorts of businesses to launch, expand, grow and succeed and now that chapter itself is garnering some well-deserved recognition of its own.
SCORE Kalamazoo/SW Michigan has been named the 2018 Chapter of the Year by the Michigan Small Business Association (SBA) and will be recognized at the 14th Annual Michigan Celebrates Small Business Awards Dinner next week on May 3rd at the Lansing Center.
SCORE Chair Debi Howe will accept the award on behalf of her colleagues on the team. She says, “I’m thrilled that the SBA recognized all the hard work SCORE volunteers have done throughout the Kalamazoo/Benton Harbor and SW Michigan area. A lot of people spend a lot of their time making this chapter excel.”
The award was received, in part, for the chapter’s flagship outreach and education event, Entrepreneurship Day (which, by the way, is scheduled to repeat on September 12th from 8 am to 4 pm at the Fetzer Center in Kalamazoo). Nominator Dan Butler, the Regional Chair of SCORE Michigan, cited the chapter’s advances as well as its initiative in client follow-through and success rates. Butler says, “This small SW Michigan Chapter has shown great initiative in providing exceptional outreach opportunities for small business in their region. They are a vital, growing chapter and well-deserving of this honor.”
In 2017, with SCORE Kalamazoo’s help:
- 100 new businesses started in the Southwest Michigan area in seven local counties
- 116 non-owner jobs were created within SW Michigan small businesses
- 41-percent of SCORE Kalamazoo/SW Michigan’s clients grew their business over 2016
Locally, SW Michigan-area business SCORE experts:
- Volunteered 2,000 hours of their time in 2017
- Increased from 28 to 43 active volunteers in 2017
- Provided 1,055 mentoring and education hours
- Celebrated 33 years serving SW Michigan businesses
According to Howe, the Kalamazoo/SW Michigan Chapter of SCORE serves a seven-county area in SW Michigan including Berrien, Branch, Cass, Calhoun, Kalamazoo, St Joseph and Van Buren counties. She says, “SCORE consistently provides a dependable and credible source of free or inexpensive business information in the form of education/workshops, mentoring, and one-on-one advising to small businesses in SW Michigan.” She adds, “And because of SCORE’s increasing popularity locally, we’re now looking for mentors and business advisers who can join our team to help small businesses grow!”
SCORE is the nation’s largest network of volunteer, expert business mentors, with more than 10,000 volunteers in 300 chapters throughout North America. A resource partner of the SBA, SCORE has helped more than 1 million entrepreneurs through mentoring, workshops and educational resources since 1964.
