Seedling to Start Up – Part 1 – Imaging or Reinventing Your Business or Product Idea During a Pandemic

The pandemic has forced small business owners and entrepreneurs to continually adapt and respond to changing COVID restrictions and external conditions. In this session, you will learn how to conduct an initial assessment and develop a new business or product idea under rapidly changing conditions. By the end of this session, you will be able to:

• Conduct an initial assessment of key areas of your business or product idea.
• Develop operating assumptions about the future based on changing or emerging conditions.
• Imagine the future state of their business/product idea.

*Schedule a 1:1 technical assistance session with Mary! CDBG grant recipients may access these services free of charge. Please contact juliab@wrenworks.org for additional information.

Instructor Bio: 

Mary Secor has over twenty years of experience developing and delivering education programs and workshops for academic, nonprofit and for-profit organizations. In her role as Vice President, Curriculum at the Crisis Prevention Institute (CPI), she led the development and implementation of CPI’s Program and Product Development Process and contributed to the design, development, testing, marketing, launch and evaluation of new training programs and products. As Program Coordinator for Outreach at the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance (NCIIA), Ms. Secor was responsible for working with member institutions in planning, organizing, promoting and delivering over thirty entrepreneurship workshops and events each year including idea pitch competitions, business plan competitions and entrepreneurship conferences and workshops. She also served as an educational consultant and provided curriculum development expertise to colleges and universities working on developing and strengthening their undergraduate entrepreneurship programs. She has presented her work at regional and national conferences and has facilitated strategic planning workshops and co-authored articles on models and curricular approaches for developing and delivering collegiate entrepreneurship programs. Ms. Secor moved to New Hampshire in 2018 and lives with her husband Dr. Douglas Arion in Bethlehem, NH.