This place is awesome for anyone who wants to start a new business. I've taken the two classes here (around $80-85 each including a lunch) and found the most beneficial one to be the course which teaches your to start your own business. I learned so much about marketing, financing, insurance, accounting, and operations when starting a new business. It's nice that they have someone that specializes in each subject to come speak and teach about it. The classroom for my courses usually had around 5-10 people and it was nice because it gave each person a chance to actually talk about their own businesses and get advice.
Another amazing thing I learned about was when the public library came by. They taught me that you can actually schedule 1 on 1 consultations with the King County Libraries to help you find data on demographics and business information that relate to your business. I actually did schedule time with the library which helped so much.
Another great service SCORE offers is mentor matching. You can meet mentors based on your business who can help you with putting together a business plan or help you with running your business. You can also schedule hour long private help with volunteers if you have any one time questions. Finally, they also offer online courses to take if you cannot attend onsite. Overall, this has been a great resource for me when thinking about starting my own business.
The only reason I am giving this a 4/5 is because there was an issue with the billing. I had e-mailed via the finance person and they said I could just pay when I arrive. This is because I initially paid online and their paypal wasn't set up to the correct e-mail address. So the payment couldn't go through. So when I arrived, they didn't have my name and said "we probably spoke a while ago", even when it was like a week ago. So there was a little bit of a mix up and I paid, but it would've been a bummer if I wasn't able to attend. read more