Our mission is to foster a vibrant small business community through mentoring and education. We aim to give every person the support they need to thrive as a small business owner. Our values hold that clients matter, small business matters, giving back matters, volunteers matter, experience matters, relationships matter, diversity matters, and lifelong learning matters. For more on how we work and serve our community, visit us here.
Below are just some of the key resources you’ll want to consider in your journey as an entrepreneur:
SCORE Websites
SCORE has a number of online resources designed to address your specific needs, whether from a functional perspective or by market vertical. Look to our Resources page or the SCORE National Small Business Resilience Hub. You’ll also find some great content in the links below:
- Accounting & Finance
- Business Plans/Startup Assistance
- Marketing
- Strategy & Planning
- Tax Planning
- Technology
Are You Ready (to start a business)?
SCORE is committed to helping all small businesses, but especially at helping you get started. The Small Business Startup To-Do List has a set of questions for potential businesspeople to assess their readiness to start a business.
You may also want to check out to SCORE Minnesota Client Resource Guide for a full range of business development tools from how to start business guides to marketing research and development, business planning basics, finance basics, and legal resources, you find a wealth of content that’s easy to use and pretty complete!
Small Business Administration Information
The Small Business Administration maintains the Small Business Resource Guide for businesses. This is a terrific quick read on what it takes to start a business including guidance on the funding programs available through the SBA and its lending partners.
SBA Loan Programs
The SBA provides a large variety of guaranteed loan programs to help finance small businesses. An overview of these programs can be found here.
Minnesota Dept. of Employment and Economic Development
The Department of Employment and Economic Development has a website with some great resources and guides for businesses in Minnesota. Familiarize yourself with the DEED Information for Business resource page and the “Guide to Starting a Business in Minnesota."
SCORE and LivePlan Overview
SCORE provides many ways to generate a business plan that will help you define your ideas and explain your business to others. One way is with software tools and a popular one of those is LivePlan from Palo Alto Software, which replaces Business Plan Pro which SCORE Twin Cities has used for years. An overview of LivePlan is in LivePlan and SCORE Twin Cities One Page Brochure.pdf.
IRS Information for Small Businesses
Taxes are a major topic of business and the IRS provides some terrific information on that. Click here to review and download Publication 583, Starting a Business and Keeping Records.
Legal Advice from LegalCORPS
Legal advice is often needed in business. Twin Cities SCORE works with LegalCORPS to make free brief business legal advice available for nearly every business need. For more information, click here.
Franchising - A Proven Way to Start a Business
SCORE and FranNet have worked together to provide a number of resources to assist anyone interested in a franchise opportunity. For a complete set of resources, click here.
SCORE Minnesota Client Resource Guide
The wealth of content available when starting or growing a business can be overwhelming, especially as you deal with so many areas of development from finance to marketing to legal and business formation issues. With the above in mind, we’re pleased to offer the SCORE Minnesota Client Resource Guide.
This simple to use, interactive PDF contains links to external and embedded content to more easily and consistently find and leverage the resources needed to nurture and develop your business.
Contact SCORE Twin Cities
This page will always be under development and changing, to keep up with the Life of Your Business and the nature of the web. Please send comments on this page through the Contact Us link on this page.
