2011-09-14-The Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship
Seminars@Hadley
The Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship
is Here for You!
Presented by
Tom Babinszki
Moderated by
Billy Brookshire
September 14, 2011
Billy Brookshire
I want to welcome you to Seminars@Hadley. Our presentation today is about the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship. It’s called The Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship is Here For You. The presenter today is Tom Babinszki. I noticed that several of you have already taken some of Tom’s courses. He teaches several already.
And you’re very soon going to see a whole lot more courses coming up that Tom’s been working on for the Forsythe Center so the course at work is about to multiply drastically with a lot more options for you, folks.
Tom is the Program Manager again for the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship and I don’t want to take anymore of his time, so I’m going to release the microphone and, Tom, I’m going to turn it over to you.
Tom Babinszki
And my name is Tom Babinszki. I am the Program Manager of the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship and let me introduce myself before we get started, as I’m a relatively new employee at the Hadley School for the Blind. I started last October. Before coming to Hadley, I was running several businesses and helping other companies establishing their business.
I was in the Washington D.C. area, primarily running a consulting business to help corporations to make their software and websites accessible to people with disabilities. I came to Hadley to convert Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship. I’m responsible for putting the curriculum together. I teach a couple of courses and I’m also responsible for promoting and advertising the program.
But what we’re going to talk about today is what exactly is The Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship. This program has existed for a while now, but the reason why we are talking about it at this point is because we have a great number of new additions to the program and I wanted to give you an overview of what we are doing here, how the Hadley School for the Blind can help you to start and run your own business.
The primary resources of the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship is an added curriculum with courses and modules - we are going to discuss later what the modules are – to help you start and run a business. In addition, we are going to provide you with online seminars and discussions, networking opportunities and online resources which will help you navigate the business environment.
I also would like to mention to you that we have received very generous funds from Sandy and Rick Forsythe who live in Winnetka and have been supporting the Hadley School for the Blind. First let’s see why is entrepreneurship a good idea, or why is it important to start your own small business.
As you may have experienced in the last several years, the economy has turned pretty rough and unfortunately, there are more and more people who are unemployed, even though unemployment trade among blind and visually impaired people has been very high.
There are certain instances when the only good opportunity that people can see as an option for their future is to start their own business, try to venture out and make an income that they can live on. The other reason is you may have a comfortable job which provides you with all the benefits – including insurance – but you may not be very happy with the income that you are making.
At our Center for Entrepreneurship, we will also show you how to start a small business as a side activity so that you can make an additional income besides your full-time employment. I would like to tell you about who is eligible to join this program.
The Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship is part of the Adult Continuing Education; therefore, the eligibility requirements are the exact same. You need to be at least 14 years old; you need to provide us with a proof of visual impairment.
But there is one difference because we also allow family members of blind and visually impaired people to join this program, the reason being is that there are many small businesses operated by entire families and we would like to give you an opportunity to learn about running a small business with your family members so that you can equally participate in the business and equally use the knowledge that you have received at the Hadley School for the Blind.
I also would like to discuss how this program is different from other business programs. To begin with, I would like to tell you that this is not a university program; this is not an MBA; it is not a general business program. Now then, let’s see what it is.
The Hadley School for the Blind put this program together specifically for blind and visually impaired entrepreneurs and business owners. We are not only going to show you from step one how to start and operate a business successfully, but we are creating curriculum that will show you everything where it is different for a blind and a visually impaired person to run a business.
Give you a couple of examples – When you register your business and decide on the form of ownership, whether you’re blind or not, it is going to be the same experience, the same procedure and the same amount of money. But when it comes to advertising your business on the internet, certain things can be very different for the simple fact that some of the websites are not equally accessible to blind and visually impaired people.
There are also other major differences when it comes to taxation; when it comes to your Social Security benefits; when it comes to your unemployment benefits or in practice, when you are doing your market research or your networking to promote your business.
We are going to point out all these differences to you and help you understand how visual impairment plays a role in running your business and make sure that you’re equally competitive in your own business.
I would like to tell you about the curriculum that we have at the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship. We have several courses which already exist that help you run your own small business. These courses can be divided into two categories – the business-related ones and the technology-related ones.
The reason why we bring in technology into this program is because at this day and age it is very, very important that you use technology to the fullest, let that be computers, cell phones, PDAs or assistive devices because they can greatly enhance what you can do for your business.
Some of our business courses include self-employment with a minimal investment. This is the keystone of this program and it’s one of the most important courses for you to start with. We highly recommend that you enroll in today’s course before you enroll to any other business courses, the reason being is that we are going to build the rest of the modules and courses on the Self-Employment Course.
This course has six lessons and it shows you what it really takes to become self-employed and start your own small business. It will help you determine what kind of business you want to start, it will help you understand a little bit about the marketing and the financial aspects and it will briefly explain your benefits as a self-employed person.
This course itself is not sufficient for you to base your business on. However, it’s sufficient for you to understand what it really means to run the business and to determine if self-employment is really an option that you would like to investigate. Again, we highly recommend that whenever you start our business courses, you enroll to the Self-Employment Course which I’m currently teaching and build the rest of the courses and modules after that.
We also have a business fundamentals course which basically explains the different concepts that you’ll encounter when running your business. We also have business communications and business writing courses which help you improve your skills when communicating with your future clients and partners and any agencies that you get in touch with when running your business.
And we also have a business law course that can help you understand different aspects of running your business when it comes to legislation.
In terms of technology, we have an Excel course available because when you start the business, you’ll find that you’ll need to do lots of calculations and lots of budgeting, so Excel is the perfect platform for you to enter your calculations into. Therefore, we have a course that will help you through the basics of using Excel and get started on your budgeting and calculation.
We have three mini-courses. One is listening skills which helps you get up to speed with your screen reader and helps you use a screen reader faster, the reason being is probably when you run your business, you’ll be using your computer quite a bit. The faster you can listen to it, the more work you can get done and this course will help you with that.
We have a formatting course which helps you format documents and understand the layout of documents that you receive and we have a web browsing course. Where this course is interesting is you may be familiar with browsing the internet, however, many of the websites are not necessarily accessible. Now in this course, we’ll show you how to deal with those websites and still get the most out of it, even though they are not as accessible as you would like them to be.
Besides, at Hadley we offer several other technology-related courses. Please contact us or call Student Services for more information on that.
Now let me get to the very exciting part and these are our new modules. We are building this Center for Entrepreneurship Program on modules instead of courses and these modules are similar to one lesson of a course. These modules are online and they consist of one lesson similar to any lessons that you’ll find in a course. The difference is that probably these modules are a bit longer than an average lesson in a course and these modules also have a more demanding essay assignment.
The modules that we are releasing are the following. We’ll start with six modules. These are Market Research; the Marketing Plan; the Financial Plan; the Business Plan; the Business Insurance and Forms of Ownership.
These modules are going to be available to you this fall and just to give you an idea how these are different – for example – when we look at the Market Research, when you take your assignment, you will have to answer several questions, but more importantly, your assignment will be to create your own market research and submit it to your instructor so that you can get feedback on your actual research and business idea.
It’s going to be the same thing with the Marketing Plan and the Business Plan where you submit your marketing plan and your business plan to your instructor based on your actual business. We’ll look at it and give you suggestions on how to improve it. So, essentially, you are going to receive advice on getting started with your new business.
At this point I would like you to understand that we are not providing business consulting; we are providing instruction and help on your plans that you submit to us as your assignment.
But this is only the starting point. In the next several years we are planning to release approximately 50 different modules related to running a business. Some of these modules are going to be federal benefits, taxes, accounting, loans, marketing and sales, networking and many, many other modules that can give you practical guidance when you run your own business.
But we are also doing something brand new and this is not only providing you with study materials, but we’ll have many online, interactive ways of learning about starting and running a business. One of these will be seminars and discussions and the title of this series will be Minding Your Own Business. This is going to be very similar to seminars at Hadley that you are already familiar with, but these seminars and discussions will be business related.
In the very near future you are going to see announcements about these seminars and we already have plans for several seminars for the rest of this year and early next year. These seminars will include presenters from all areas of the business and you will have a chance to have discussions and ask questions from the presenters.
Many of these seminars will have to do with technology, as I mentioned. I would like to make sure that you are able to use different technologies and be up to date when it comes to running your business. All of our seminars related to seminars at Hadley will be recorded and will be available to you after the seminar is over in case you didn’t have a chance to attend it.
Also at the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship, we are going to place a huge emphasis on networking among businesses which are owned and operated by blind and visually impaired people. Primarily it will be done by our brand new Business Directory which we are releasing. In this Business Directory, you can submit your company, provide us with your contact information and tell us about your business and also tell people what it really means to you to be a blind or visually impaired business owner.
This Business Directory will allow you to browse any other companies which are owned by blind business owners and will allow you to get in touch with them, exchange experiences and hopefully use each other’s goods and services. We are going to roll out some other programs that will make networking even easier to blind business owners.
Now, when is this program available, you may ask. It is going to start almost immediately. We’ll start enrollment to our new modules on the 19th of September, but you can enroll anytime to our currently existing courses and again, I would like to emphasize that I highly recommend you start with our Self-Employment Course.
The Business Directory is going to be available immediately and we are going to have seminars for the rest of the year and you’re going to receive notices similarly to how you receive notices about seminars at Hadley.
If you have any questions about the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship, please contact us. There are many ways of getting in touch with us. You can visit our website which is which stands for Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship. You can call our Student Services or you can email us at .
I also would like to tell you that we have a website for the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship where you will be able to read about our courses, our modules, our new press releases and information. There is a section about business related resources and you’ll find our Business Directory on the website. To go to this website, you can go to We’ll keep this website very up to date and you’ll see every new information as soon as it comes out.
So this is basically what I have for you in a nutshell about the Center for Entrepreneurship and most importantly today, I would like to open the floor for questions and please let me know if you have any questions or requests or anything else that you would like to know about the Forsythe Center for Entrepreneurship.
Billy Brookshire
And while folks are formulating their questions, Tom, we had quite a few come in through the chat room over here and I’ll try not to read them all. The first questions had to do with getting information in text. We have two folks on the call with us who are deaf, blind and are concerned about getting information in text and you had told me that that stuff would be available. They’re wondering how do they access it?
And related is we’ve got another person who is already a student of Hadley and wants to know if they’re already a student at Hadley, do they have to register for FCE also?
Tom Babinszki
Thank you very much. Very good questions. As of today, we do not offer captioning for our seminars at the time when we present the seminars. However, we are going to record these seminars and post them online and we are working on providing text transcription for the seminars as well. So this information will be available in text format.
The other thing that’s probably most important about the Center for Entrepreneurship is that every information that we’ll provide to you to learn about starting and running a business is going to be in a text format. All of our courses are text-based; all of our instructions and study materials and examples and resources are text-based, so you will be able to fully participate in the program.