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Rochester SCORE honors owners of Imprintable Solutions, Dazzing Dust Bunnies

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Tina Paradiso, Jack Dailey
Tina Paradiso, owner of Imprintable Solutions, and SCORE mentor Jack Dailey

When Tina Paradiso bought a printing business five years ago, it turned out to be quite a different experience from what she had anticipated. The financials weren’t as good as she had thought, and “the back office was a mess.”

Now that company is the successful Imprintable Solutions. On May 3, Tina was honored as a “Client of the Year” by the Greater Rochester Chapter of SCORE.

Tina credited her two SCORE mentors, Jack Dailey and the late Tony Carlisi, with helping her to turn the company around. They guided her on streamlining processes to be more efficient, and figuring out how to grow the company using the resources she had.

At the “Client of the Year” luncheon held at Oak Hill, Tina thanked SCORE, its partner the U.S. Small Business Administration, and Pathstone with helping her make her business a success. When she was starting out, “I had no idea how rich in resources Rochester is for entrepreneurs,” she told the group of about 100 attendees. She also urged the business owners in the room to seek certification as a Minority or Women-Owned Business Enterprise (MWBE), which can help the business get contracts. Tina said 41% of her customers are due to her having the certification. She also bought a second business in 2016.

 

Kristin Ragona, Evie Hurt
SCORE mentor Kristin Ragona and Evie Hurt, owner of Dazzling Dust Bunnies

Also honored as a “Client of the Year” was Evie Hurt, owner of Dazzling Dust Bunnies, which provides cleaning services to homes. Kristin Ragona has been Evie’s SCORE mentor since 2014. Evie said that she knew when she started her cleaning business that she wanted to have employees, and be insured and bonded.

When she met with Kristin, “she gave me great information on the very first day”  and the two have continued to meet for mentoring sessions. Today, Dazzling Dust Bunnies has four employees and 50-60 regular clients in Orleans and Monroe counties. The Better Business Bureau has awarded the company a five-star rating. “We’re getting well known for the quality work that we do,” Evie said. “I don’t hire someone who doesn’t have the passion for house cleaning like I do.”

Each year, the Greater Rochester Chapter of SCORE honors clients who have worked with SCORE mentors over several years and have established profitable businesses. The event was part of a day of seminars on “Knowing, Growing and Protecting Your Business.”

To read about the 2017 Clients of the Year, click here. 

I’m the chairman of volunteers for the SCORE chapter, and we offer free one-on-one mentoring and low-cost or free workshops. This group does amazing work, I’m proud to say. I’m always looking for savvy business people to join our chapter as mentors. For more information on our chapter’s mentoring services, workshops or volunteering, click here.

 

Clients of the Year Tina Paradiso and Evie Hurt with SCORE volunteers Art Roberts (chapter chairman), Jack Dailey, Kristin Ragona and Bill Ritter (district chairman).

Register for SCORE’s free biz seminars, meet lenders and yes, lunch!

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I don’t know of any business-oriented organization that offers such great quality content and advice for free better than SCORE does.

I’ve been a member of the Greater Rochester Chapter of SCORE for about two years and the level of expertise of our volunteers is amazing.  They are men and women with impressive careers with both big name companies and smaller enterprises.

The “Gear up to Grow Your Business” event on Wednesday, May 3, will put that business expertise on full display. Attendees can choose from two of four seminars to attend in the morning:

  • Growth Through Leaps and Bounds: Joint Venture, Merger, Acquisition

  • Business Protection and Continuity.

  • Be Prepared: The Changing Landscape of Government Regulations, Policies and Procedures.

  • Personality Profiles: It’s No Longer About You. It’s About the Person You’re Selling To. 

Descriptions of each session are here.

Then there will be lunch at which two local business people will be honored as “Client of the Year.”

In the afternoon, from 1:30 to 4 p.m. there will be a “bank matchmaker” event, which will give business owners and entrepreneurs the opportunity to meet one-on-one with local lenders — banks, Kiva, credit unions, etc.

And in case you missed the word “free” in the headline, this event is all free on May 3. It starts with registration, networking and continental breakfast from 8:15 a.m. to 9 a.m. The workshops start at 9. The event will be at Oak Hill Country Club, 145 Kilbourn Road, in Pittsford.

When you register here, you can let us know which workshops you want to attend. And you don’t need to attend the entire day. Our registration form allows for you to check off whether you plan to attend just some or all events.

I’ll be there helping with registration, and then attending two sessions so I, too, can keep learning. Questions? Let me know.

5 must-read articles to grow your blogging audience

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Some of my Internet research on ways to grow your audience for your blog.
Some of my Internet research on ways to grow your audience for your blog.

Are you spending hours blogging but the response is crickets? I’m going to help Rochester area bloggers with that dilemma in my class Blogging 201 at Writers and Books on Nov. 1.

I’ve been looking for best practices and tips to share with my students, which has meant digging through the Internet (or the “black hole” as I’ve been calling it).

So I thought I’d share links to five articles I’ve found that I consider must-reads for bloggers.

Here they are:

How to write headlines that drive traffic shares and search results by Nathan Ellering. Ellering wrote this for the CoSchedule Blog. He writes about CoSchedule’s amazing headline analyzer, in which you can paste in your blog headline to see how it scores. The analyzer looks at word balance, length of headline and headline type and Ellerby explains what each part means and gives tips on writing better headlines. I am definitely going to start using this tool for all my blog headlines.

Blogging gone bad: 7 mistakes you don’t want to make by Michael Hyatt. Hyatt is my guru on so many topics related to business, blogging and leadership. In this post, he offers ways to fix common mistakes of bloggers including creating posts that aren’t scannable and being inconsistent in your blogging schedule. I always recommend Hyatt as resource to my Blogging 101 students.

3 free tools to help you understand your online audience by Larry Kim. In this blog post for Social Media Today, Kim writes about how so many businesses don’t understand their target audience. That goes for bloggers, too. He gives brief summaries of Google Analytics, Facebook Audience Manager, and Twitter Audience Insights.

How to market with email newsletters posted on the SCORE website. A great way to gather a following to your blog is to collect email addresses, and then send out an email newsletter on a regular basis, which includes links to your blog postings. This posting walks you through how to get started, including explaining how to comply with the the CAN-SPAM Act. The post also includes a link to download a guide. I’m a volunteer mentor with Greater Rochester Chapter of SCORE and the national website of SCORE is a treasure trove of helpful information and webinars.

Facebook Page or Group: The Definitive Answer by Andrea Vahl. I stumbled upon Vahl in one of my “black hole” searches on the Internet, and I’m glad I did. She works with small businesses on their social media. Her posting confirms what I’ve grown to realize: A Facebook Group can be a great way to interact with people of similar interests. Sounds perfect for bloggers, while a Facebook Page is better for branding your business.

If you’re interested in taking Blogging 201, call Writers and Books at (585)-473-2590. Only a few spots were available as of today but I’ll teach the course again in 2017.