Bill Pray, a former CEO, chairs the SCORE — Service Corps of Retired Executives — chapter for Northeast Florida, served by 48 volunteers who provide more than 100 workshops a year. He says 90 percent of the workshops are free and take place at the U.S. Small Business Administration office, JAX Chamber and some libraries. The website is scorejax.org.
I’ve been involved with SCORE about six years. I’m retired. I had a business in Jacksonville and was lucky enough to hire good people and partially retire in 2000. After about five years working part time, I decided I was done with that. I was looking for an avenue where I could still affect people and help more people succeed.
I moved here in 1978 from New York. I formed a partnership with a gentleman that I knew very well. He got out of the business about six years later. We were purchased by a public company and I decided to stay. Then we took our company, which was called at the time Barnett Brass & Copper, and we spun that out as a standing publicly held company. We called it Barnett. In the beginning, the company was selling brass fittings and we expanded that to about 10,000 to 15,000 products from plumbing, electrical and jan-san (janitorial and sanitation supplies). It was sold to Interline Brands Inc. in 2000 and I stayed on for five years. They subsequently sold to The Home Depot.
About 43 percent of our clients are people just getting into business. The percentage of people that have already been in business is about 30 percent, and 10 percent after two years.
I can assure them that it’s tough. If they’re doing it because they want to work shorter hours, it probably won’t work. They have to have some passion for what they’re getting involved in. That’s extremely important. They have to have an attitude of “I won’t give up and I won’t take no for an answer.”
In the first year, 67 percent of businesses are successful but by the fourth year, only about 30 percent are successful. Most businesses start out with great ideas, they do well, and then they run out of cash. An important thing for a new business is to have the ability to borrow money.
I’ve lived it. It’s very difficult and I made some dumb decisions when I was much younger that almost put us at risk. I was fortunate enough to have a good banker to fund us and the business recuperated and we did extremely well. So failure in going into a new business, or not being successful in everything you do, is the norm. And you’ve got to be able to handle that when it occurs.
I’m at the age that I would like to live a long time, so I work out five to six days a week. I don’t call myself a golfer, but I also play golf. I probably devote about 20 hours a week to SCORE. We do about 5,000 to 6,000 sessions a year, so we’re serving 6,000 people here in the Jacksonville market per year. For every three clients we have, one of them will go into business, so we have a very good effect on our client base.
We’re always looking for not only clients but volunteers. We try to get people with different backgrounds that can help. Our mission statement basically is, we’re there for the clients.