It's very difficult to know how long a blog entry is until it's posted, so please forgive the overly long previous entry. If you did make it all the way through to the end, then you know how I came to be in the position of needing more work and why I chose to create a seminar for small businesses. I won't waste a lot of space going over the previous post. The short of it, and I'm sure you want the short version, is that I have a lot of information I've either figured out the hard way or have discussed with others in business and I want to pass this on to anyone thinking of starting a small business or already in one and wanting to make certain they are going down the right path.
After my unscientific survey, which consisted of asking as many small business owners as I could about their interest in a seminar like this, I decided to proceed. What was the first step? First I needed to research the topics for my seminar. I could not come up with two and a half hours of small business insights and knowledge on the spur of the moment. Well, I guess I could but no one would want to pay me to listen to it. I needed to be more organized and through.
I went to the web page of my favorite professional education vendor and looked over their course list. In the past the normal course provided eight, sixteen or twenty-four hours of continuing credit which was fine. In depth is the way to go with tax and accounting topics. But this time I needed a lot of information about a lot of different topics and didn't have the time or the money to take ten or twelve eight hour courses. Lucky for me, this year the educational group had come up with some short courses that covered all the topics I wanted to know more about. Perfect! I purchased and downloaded my classes and got to work.
I wanted to develop two things before I gave my first seminar, the first was a seminar manual which would go hand in hand with what I was going to talk about and the other was the actual seminar. The manual would be provided in PDF format so that seminar participants could have it loaded on their computer, iPad, phone or other electronic reading device and be able to refer to it as I conducted the seminar. The manual would have links to web pages of interest which could be accessed through the manual if the Internet was available.
This seemed to be going well and I was making good progress, then tax season hit. I took a few months off from my preparation to get some work out and some money in. Then it was back to work in June on the companion manual which is now almost finished. I had visited a web page in which all the FAQs were presented in a question-answer format that I found to be easily understood and to present information that I needed without a lot of extra language I didn't want wade through. I decided to structure the companion manual in that way making it easy to read and not filled with extra information. Just the facts, ma'am. The seminar is the place to get the facts filled out and plumped up with extra knowledge.
Next blog entry will discuss finding a place to hold the seminar and advertising. One proved easier than the other but both were new experiences for me.
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