Mentorship & Growth

SCORE

SCORE is the largest network of volunteer business mentors in the United States — a nonprofit affiliated with the Small Business Administration that pairs entrepreneurs with retired and active executives across virtually every industry. Mentoring is free, confidential, and ongoing; several hundred thousand businesses use SCORE annually for strategic counsel, marketing review, financial planning, and operational guidance.

Many of the businesses FreeTEM audits are growing past the size where the owner can run telecom by intuition, but haven’t yet hired the CFO or VP of IT who’d own the function professionally. SCORE mentors handle the operating-maturity questions we can’t — succession planning, the first real finance hire, when to take outside capital, whether to franchise. We refer at the edges of our engagement because the questions clients ask after an audit are often bigger than the audit itself.

Operating Partner

Alfonso Bonin

Chapter Co-Chair