Gov Funding, Executive Coaching, COVID-19 Resources and more
For the past few weeks, our CoSolo community has been buzzing with conversations about COVID-19, Federal economic stimulus (CARES Act), and its impact on Independent Consulting. Our #COVID-19 Slack channel has been humming with member messages about resources, questions, and suggestions on how Independent Consultants can apply for financial assistance offered via CARES act. To get more clarity on PPP, SBA, and other financial assistance programs, we brought in 3 finance experts and hosted a webinar on April 3rd. The gist of what we learned is highlighted below:
You should apply to both PPP and SBA. There doesn’t seem to be much of a downside as long as you are asking for different things from each program (e.g. PPP for payroll, SBA for the expense).
PPP: You need to go through a business bank.
SBA: You can go through the government website. The link can be found at the bottom of this newsletter in the COVID-19 resources section.
You cannot claim unemployment benefits if you have some income right now. So, if your revenue decreased by 99%, but you're still making $1.00, you are not eligible.
Many members in the community applied for both PPP and SBA, and at least one member has received PPP payment. Tony also knows someone outside of CoSolo who got a SBA $10k grant. However, this person applied 1 week before it was generally available. As of now, it seems you can only get $1k per employee. Regardless, unless your revenue stream has not been impacted, we highly encourage everyone to apply for both PPP and SBA.
You can watch the webinar here to get more details.
🎉Live Learning Event - Webinar and Q&A with Empathy Expert Executive Coach Seung Chan Lim (Slim)
Please join us this Thursday, April 16th from 2:00 - 3:00 PM EST for a special webinar with Seung Chan Lim (Slim). Slim is an author, speaker, and executive coach who supports small to midsize CEOs from around the world. He specializes in leadership, psychology, relationship building, and meaningful interaction. In this webinar, Slim will be sharing his experience and insight on building a coaching business. For more information about Slim, this special live learning opportunity, and event registration, please follow this link.
🌷Accepting Applications for Spring 2020
There is no better time to join CoSolo than right now. We are currently accepting applications for our new Spring Term which begins April 20th. If you are serious about building your independent/boutique consulting business and you think it will be beneficial to have other fellow consultants advise and hold you accountable, consider joining us!
You can try us out risk-free for one month. Please sign-up here.
Need more convincing? See what some of our members have to say: "I met my partner at CoSolo, and we closed multiple 5 figure deals.” -David Gritz, Startup Consultant "CoSolo offers great value. I get high-quality business coaching for less than $50 per week. You can't get that anywhere else." -Michael Feyen, Organizational Psychologist
🤝 New Members
We are thrilled to announce that we have recently gained 9 members. Cat Forgarty Nyman, Mo Abuali, Nora Hamada, Stephanie Shalofsky, Denisa Meritiri, Blair Severn, Albert Chen, Craig Paxson, and Mike Scheid welcome from all of us at CoSolo. We are so excited to have each and every one of you.
We’d like to thank Mike Gammarino, Luke Sandler, and Alexis Own for referring some of the new members to CoSolo.
❗️COVID-19 Resources for Consultants In our members-only Slack community, our members engage regularly to discuss and share knowledge. Ideas, tools, resources, and the like are circulated on an ongoing basis. During these trying times, our members have been extremely helpful in sharing resources pertaining to COVID-19 relief for independent consultants. Hopefully, the following resources are as helpful to you as they have been for our members. ℹ️Organized COVID-19 Info: To help ease the difficulty of keeping track of the overwhelming amount of COVID-19 information that is circling around on a daily basis, CoSolo member, Mike Gammarino, created a single page that aggregates news from only the top-level news organizations (WSJ, The Washington Post, NYT). It is continuously being updated and is loaded with vital resources and information. Awesome job, Mike! 🌐Customer Communication: COVID-19 has brought many challenges, one of which involves how we communicate with our clients. This article shares the top 5 tech tools for customer communication that business owners are using in the wake of the pandemic. And no, it’s not just Zoom (it didn’t even make the list!). 🏦Disaster Loan Assistance: For those who want to apply for a $10k+ SBA loan (potentially forgivable), use this link.
✍️Content from CoSolo Members Deepak Lalwani and his team share insight on managing transformation and change during these troubling times in this TechTarget article. Check out their (7!) supply chain management best practices in a COVID-19 world. Great content, Deepak! Digital experience strategist, Laura Stringer, recently shared her expertise on experience and operations with Boye & Co. She talks about the imperativeness of operations when it comes to optimizing a website’s customer experience. This article is jam-packed with crucial information. Nice work, Laura! Fellow CoSolo Members, have you been featured or quoted in any published work recently? Do you have any original content that you’d like included in our newsletter? If so and you’d like it to be shared with the wider community (no shame for self-promotion here!) please email it to staff@cosolo.co.