Jenny and her Entrepreneurial Journey-Week 9

Welcome, Readers, to the week of our third and final major presentation on the status of our entrepreneurial plans: Retrospective 3.

It is a week of wrapping up. A week of paperwork and final pre-launch details.

As I mentioned in the last post, all of us thought there would be a winding down after the last numbers-crunching session, and there was a brief reprieve, but no, not really. That “reprieve” was actually a gear shift down to a lower but no less important gear: The tying up of loose ends and looking towards the future --- post-RMMFI Entrepreneur Bootcamp.

This is the week when all of the preparation of the past some weeks comes together in the form of an Executive Summary, and when we participants publicly update our plans for What’s Next. By the end of this week, with only two more weeks following before graduation, we are preparing and submitting loan proposals and final business plans. It is all coming together very fast, but not without scrutiny and thought. Just very fast.

Mentors and facilitators will form a “Launch Panel” and offer advice and good tidings for short-term and long view success, and momentously, the Executive Director greets us as soon-to-be new graduates of this business bootcamp, having gone through the fire and now needing extra encouragement. And we do. This is the week where we open new bank accounts for our businesses, if we haven’t already, and when plans for a Re-Launch are in the air.

Will there be a party? Will there be a Grand Re-Opening? New signage? A new effort to re-organize that builds upon what has just been learned and applied over the past two months?

Yes, these weeks continue to be busy.

Look at some of the reasons: We each can’t help re-visiting our “Why”. We each can’t avoid looking at the financing as through a looking glass being that they are not yet “real” in most cases, a mirror on the one hand showing us the realities of our costs and expenses, but also a crystal ball of sorts that we are using to peer into a possible future.

We each can’t avoid dreaming. But that’s good: We are in the week where the dream evolves into a solidified plan. Hard to ignore the significance of the moment.

AARP is proud to collaborate with Rocky Mountain MicroFinance to offer scholarships for those 50 plus to pursue entrepreneurial opportunities.