Hi. This is Paul Zoelloser, and welcome to the Awarepreneurs podcast. On this show, we dive deep into wisdom from some of the world's leading social entrepreneurs. Our goal is to help increase your positive impact, your profitability, and your quality of life. Before we get into today's topic, I have one request. If you could hit subscribe and do a review on your favorite podcast app, It helps more people learn how to have a positive impact through a values based business. Thank you so much. Today, your guest is me, Paul Zellizer, the founder of Awarepreneur's podcast and a social entrepreneur coach.

And it's time for our regular monthly solo episode. Our topic is how December shapes a resilient new year, vision and goals in your 2024 Impact business. And I'd like to start off with a story today. So through the summer and this fall, I've had the honor of being the business coach for the SBA Thrive cohort. It's an accelerator program run by the small business administration of the US, and there are cohorts all over the country, but I am the business coach for the Albuquerque cohort. We have 21 cohort members and As part of the program, we meet as a group. We actually are having our final meeting, our 8th meeting, this upcoming Wednesday, and we're drawing a close to this awesome 6 month long accelerator program. There's 21 cohort members, and as part of the program, I meet with people twice.

Once about in the middle of the program and once towards the end to work on something called their growth plan, and we are very much involved in that process now. So lots of individual sessions, and the Thrive program is awesome if you're in the US and you're business that has at least 1 employee beside yourself, been in business for at least 2 years, highly recommended. It's an awesome accelerator program, particularly focused on those who don't have formal business training like an MBA. So I've been really deep involved in these wonderful, really kind of gritty and granular folks in terms of their subject matter expert, whether it's a construction business or there's a couple hair salons and there's an awesome bookstore in the program. There's an incredible local brewery and food using local ingredients, all these awesome humans doing all kinds of great things. But as folks who don't, like myself, don't have formal business training, I don't have an MBA. I have awesome mentoring and great coaching training and lots of experience around things like emotional intelligence and leadership, but I don't have formal business training in terms of forecasting and projections and creating spreadsheets and things like that. These are things that I've had to learn as best I can, but they are my strong points, certainly from an academic perspective, and these are things that, you know, came a little awkward to me, honestly, and to a lot of my clients.