| Platinum & Gold Partners |
Charleston Area Charitable Foundation
& Forsythe Family Farms
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| Silver Partners | |
Agracel
Citizens National Bank
City of Charleston
City of Paris
East Central Illinois Development Corporation
Edgar County Bank
Effingham County Board
First Neighbor Bank
Journal Gazette/Times Courier
Karen Wolters, Ignite, USA
Moultrie County Board
Paris Community Foundation
Paris First
U.S. Bank |
| Other Partners | |
Bob and Nancy Williams
Charleston Area Chamber of Commerce
Eastern Illinois Education for Employment Systems
Fifth Third Bank
Flesor Family Confectionary, Inc.
Frank and Cathy Brummer
Greater Effingham Chamber of Commerce and Industry
In Memory of Jack Clifford
McDonalds of Coles County
Paul Ruff
SCH Consulting
Schultz Investment Company
State Bank of Arthur
Tuscola National Bank
Vantage Outsourcing
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| Entrepreneurial Endeavors | |
Greetings!
Get ready for the wave of activity coming your way to celebrate Global Entrepreneurship Week, November 15-19th! We're kicking it off early by featuring Joyce Madigan, CPA with Gilbert, Metzger and Madigan at the Consultant Connection Luncheon this Thursday at Cody's in Mattoon. Then, it is nonstop week filled with free educational opportunities with successful regional entrepreneurs like Mike Yager of Mid-America Motorworks and Bill Skeens of Prairie City Bakery. Learn about importing and exporting "how to's" from World Trade Illinois. We'll close out the week by highlighting four companies that will pitch their business ideas to interested investors and angels at our second annual Prairie Spark Investment Forum. All are welcome!
K-12 students and their teachers can celebrate the week by entering a random drawing to win an I-Pod by just by filling out a survey about creating entrepreneurship clubs in the region. Click here to take the survey. Hurry, surveys must be completed by Wednesday, November 17th!
If all this doesn't inspire you, Scroll down and hear the keynote speaker of the BSC/SCORE Breakfast, Karen Wolters of Ignite USA, discuss how it is never too late to start a business.
It should be a great week! Get pysched by taking two minutes right now and view, "Entrepreneurs Can Change the World". Click here to view Entrepreneurs Can Change the World
Have a great week and unleash your ideas! |
All are Invited to Consultant Connection Networking Luncheons Thursday, Nov. 11th
Cody's Restaurant, Mattoon
noon - 1:30 pm
Joyce Madigan of Gilbert, Metzger and Madigan Accounting Firm will lead a discussion about business tax deductions, business structure and record keeping tips for small businesses. |
 Local Global Entrepreneurship Week Programming
Ten million people are expected to participate in 40,000 events in 100 countries next week. Be a part of it. Most are free. Thank you to EIU's School of Business and the Academy of Lifetime Learning for helping host these events!
Free Events Tuesday through Thursday - no registration is required.
Tuesday - Bill Skeens - From Dorm Room start-up to Seinfeld's 'Top of the Muffin' and Beyond" 5:30 pm Lumpkin Hall Auditorium, EIU Wednesday - "Going Global: See How It's Done" Mike Yager, CEO Mid-America Motorworks and Bill Lada, World Trade Illinois" 5:30 pm Lumpkin Hall Auditorium, EIU Thursday - Prairie Spark Regional Investment Forum 7:30-9 am Lifespan Center, Mattoon (See more information below) Click Here for the more information on the GEW Events. |
 Regional Investment Forum
Thursday, November 18, 2010
7:30 - 9 am
LifeSpan Center (Loxa Rd and Cty. Rd. 800 North), Mattoon
Nuvixa, Lamboo Inc., Midwest Reclamation and Excavation and Jangee Venture, LLC will pitch their business ideas to potential angel investor and venure capitalists in hopes of securing financing. All are welcome to watch. Invest locally and help these regional companies grow! |
Great Source for Regional Demographics
Did you know... East Central Illinois Development Corporation (ECIDC) provides free, online demographic data and market profiles for each county in the ECIDC region (Christian, Clark, Coles, Crawford, Cumberland, Douglas, Edgar, Effingham, Jasper, Moultrie, and Shelby). The ECIDC Data Bank and Resource Center includes demographics, population, workforce, business profiles, and much more. To learn more about this online resource, please visit https://ui.constantcontact.com/rnavmap/em/ecampaign/www.ecidc.com.
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BSC/SCORE Breakfast Highlights
A record 105 attendees were present to see Susan Hanfland of SCH Consulting win the BSC Volunteer of the Year Award and Bob Webb and Eli Sidwell win the SCORE Volunteer of the Year Awards. Testimonials about the counseling assistance provided by SCORE and the BSC were shared by Shimerz Glass and Bath Design Center and Castle Finn Winery. Karen Wolters, CEO of Ignite, USA, spoke about how it is never too late to start a business. Wolters, 65, started her business at age 50 and has grown it to $40 million in sales.
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Karen Wolters, Ignite USA was the keynote speaker. Click here to see her speech. |
 | | SCORE Counselors Dave Arseneau and Ted Ostrem pose with Donna and John Craig of Shimerz Glass and Bath Design Center. |
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Bring Junior Achievement to Your School
Archer Daniels Midland Co. announced a $1.3 million donation to support education initiatives in Central Illinois. Because of their generous support Junior Achievement will continue to serve the 430 classrooms in Cass, Champaign, Christian, Coles, DeWitt, Douglas, Macon, Menard, Morgan, Moultrie, Piatt, Sangamon, and Shelby counties. Junior Achievement programs introduce students to economic concepts and workplace skills in kindergarten and continue through the 12th grade.
Junior Achievement programs are popular with teachers because the curricula are aligned with the Illinois Educational Teaching Standards and are designed to help increase test scores. Teachers report regularly the impact JA has on their students. They are seeing positive results on the ISAT test, and report that students also have a better attitude toward all aspects of school.
Please contact us if you would like to get involved with the JA program. We need business volunteers and teachers that want to offer the curriculum in their classroom.
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How to Start a Business Workshop
Learn where to begin to start your own business. The workshop is held at the following locations. Cost is $25/person & $35/couple.
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Effective Uses of Social Media For Fundraising
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It's easy to see how social media and online communities can be effective platforms for sharing stories and getting feedback from supporters, but what about the money?
Facebook Causes is a good place to get your feet wet. It's a built-in donation-processing system that leverages the GuideStar database and Network For Good's payment infrastructure. The advantages of Causes are that it's inexpensive (4.75%), and relatively easy to get going.
Wherever you are on the social media fundraising curve, it's important to start testing concepts now and refine your approach as you go. There's no cookie-cutter approach that will work: even though the tools are similar, your communities are not. Read the full article here. |
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 | | Stan Thurman - BSC Counselor |
"Hot Links"
www.bls.gov U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics -More data than you could ever imagine concerning business & labor
http://www.city-data.com/ Collected and analyzed data from numerous sources to create as complete and interesting profiles of all U.S. cities. Over 74,000 city photos not found anywhere else, graphs of latest real estate prices and sales trends, recent home sales, home value estimator, hundreds of thousands of maps, satellite photos, stats about residents (race, income, ancestries, education, employment...), geographical data, state profiles, crime data, registered sex offenders, cost of living, housing, religions, businesses, local news links based on our exclusive technology, birthplaces of famous people, political contributions, city government finances and employment, weather, tornadoes, earthquakes, hospitals, schools, libraries, houses, airports, radio and TV stations, zip codes, area codes, air pollution, latest unemployment data, time zones, water systems and their health and monitoring violations, comparisons to averages, local poverty details, professionally written city guides, car accidents, fires, bridge conditions, cell phone and other towers, mortgage data, business storefront photos, a forum and a social network with 900,000 registered members and 15,000,000 posts, blogs, 5,000 user-submitted facts, 25,000 exclusive local business profiles with photos, restaurant inspection results, and more demographics. Research any city, zip code, or neighborhood. |
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As always, if you have any questions or suggestions on how the BSC can assist entrepreneurs, please don't hesitate to call us at 581-2913.
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