SCORE Michigan Celebrates 50 Years, Local Chapter 10 Years

January 23, 2014

“The Business Plan” is a partnership between the Ludington & Scottville Area Chamber of Commerce and Mason County Press.

By Matt Larson. Business Development Consultant. Ludington & Scottville Area Chamber of Commerce.

SCORE, a nonprofit association dedicated to helping small businesses throughout the US and its territories through education and mentorship, is celebrating its 50th anniversary. The Ludington Chapter has been in the area helping businesses start and succeed for the last 10 years. SCORE Michigan has nine chapters and over 270 volunteer business professionals who annually donate over 30,000 hours of their time and talent to help aspiring entrepreneurs and existing small businesses succeed by providing nearly 5,000 mentoring sessions free of charge and offering small business educational workshops to over 4,600 people.

If it wasn’t for a group of individuals taking on the initiative to start a local group of mentors some businesses may have never received the support they needed to start or continue. Judy Stouder, Ron Lamb, Jim Beal, Chuck Paukstis and Dick Donakowski were some of the original founding mentors and have remained active with the group over the last 10 years. Beal, Stouder and Lamb all served as chairs for the group.

For the past 50 years, SCORE has helped over 10 million small businesses across the country reach their goals, that is 1 business every 3 minutes since 1964. Responsible for creating 64% of net new private-sector jobs, small businesses are vital components to our economy’s growth.

Consumers can support this growing sector by supporting the small firms, restaurants and other independent retailers in their communities.

With 11,000+ volunteers, 13 being local, and mentors in 62 industries and more than 340 locations nationwide, small business owners are able to find the help they need via many different programs from one-to-one free and confidential mentoring to group seminars or workshops, to the thousands of current and relevant small business resources available on www.ludington.score.org. The Ludington SCORE chapter is here to help many more businesses for years and years to come.

In a partnership with the Business Opportunity Center at West Shore Community College, SCORE mentors will be helping facilitate workshops this spring that work through business ideas, writing a business plan and marketing the business upon launch. Workshops will be held at WSCC.

• The Road to Independence – Exploring Entrepreneurship

• Fundamentals of Writing a Business Plan – The Basics

• Fundamentals of Writing a Business Plan – Marketing and Finance

• Fundamentals of Marketing Your Business

For more information about taking advantage of SCORE services, workshop dates/details

or to attend the monthly inventors/entrepreneurs network, contact Matt Larson at the

Ludington & Scottville Area Chamber at mattl@ludington.org, 231-845-0324, or visit