FAIRFIELD — MaryAnn Croce owns an auto shop in Norwalk and has operated the business since 1999. While the business is successful, she said she wished she had experienced just how much work goes into running a business before she owned one.
“The one lesson that I wish I knew beforehand was that you’re going to have challenges. You’re not going to have it all figured out, no matter what stage of business you’re in. The only constant is change,” Croce said.
Croce didn’t have anyone to show her the ropes but she’s now one of a number of business owners who have agreed to mentor a new generation of business students at Sacred Heart University. The college recently unveiled its new Entrepreneurial Mentorship Program, where students are paired one on one with business owners who will help them start their own businesses.
As part of the program, Sacred Heart will partner with SCORE, a nationwide business mentorship program formerly known as the Service Corps of Retired Executives. The group has a branch in Fairfield.
While the program just started, SCORE Education Committee Chair Tim Ryan said he’s noticed over the past year more and more people are willing to start up their own business. More people have resigned from their jobs over the past two years in what is now being known as the Great Resignation, he said.
“In 2021, the U.S. Census Bureau said 5.4 million businesses were started in the U.S.,” Ryan said. “That’s up 55 percent from 2019, which was the pre-COVID period. So a part of it, evidently is based on need. I mean, with restaurants closing and hospitality closing, people needed to start their own business as a way of having income coming in.”
One of the students, Gabriella D’Arienzo, a business management major, said she wanted to open her own dance studio, having worked with other studios in the past. She attended the program announcement and said she’s interested in becoming involved.
Even though D’Arienzo is a business major, she doesn’t have much in the way of resources or knowledge to help fund her idea, she said.
“I always wondered how do you start a business from nothing,” she said. “I do understand it, how to set up a business. I do understand that. But I just don’t understand how you come from nothing into an actual business.”
D’Arienzo’s challenges aren’t unique. Jeanine Andreassi is a professor and chair of the university’s department of management. Many businesses fail because the owners didn’t seriously consider if their business serves a need in their communities. Many students she said, are also first generation college students, who don’t come from well-off backgrounds where social networks lessen the barriers to entry.
But SCORE gives students specific tools to further focus their ideas, Andreassi said.
“They consider all the different factors that they need to in terms of, what is the market? Is the market big enough for the product or service they’re looking to launch? What are the costs versus the defaults of projecting costs, determining what price we would need to set?” she said. “All those types of things are very important starting a new business and can certainly mean the difference between success or failure.”
Andreassi said the mentorship program will help students with all kinds of business ideas, from mom and pop shops to apps and other products and services. One of her former students, for example, now operates a cannabis business in Boston, she said.
While the mentorship program just started, Andreassi said about a dozen students have expressed interest in participating.
Ryan stressed that SCORE while SCORE is there to mentor students, it is not a consulting group.
“Mentoring, of course, is different from actually doing the work,” he said. “We’re not a consultant that actually does the work. We’re not able to actually fill out paperwork and so forth for people. But we have a lot of resources and knowledge available to us.”
Croce said the program will help students who already know business fundamentals and are seeking real world experience to learn from others who have already done it.
“There’s so much value to actually going in and doing things that we’ve learned formally through education, but then also, the things that we learned from doing right, like COVID,” she said. “Who could have prepared anybody, for COVID?”
But now that everyone has experienced the pandemic, there are lessons to learn, she said.
“Whether it was modifying your messaging or how you were going to pivot a little bit and change your model,” Croce said.