IEEE
Fran O’Connell is
a senior member in the
Next Meeting: TBD
Location: Friend Convocation Room, Princeton University Campus
On Olden St. at
<http://www.princeton.edu/~pumap/buildings/128.html>
TBD
Time: 6:00pm – 6:30pm – Meet and Greet, followed by a talk and questions until
7:45pm
All invited, Free meeting
Light refreshments served
See also http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r1/princeton-centraljersey/
for the latest in IEEE PCJS events.
Send Fran or Star Willmarth your ideas for other meeting topics:
Fran_oconnell at
fxoinc.com
Willmarth at IEEE.com
Past Meetings:
Monday, June 7, 2010 at 6:00 pm – Ken Sickles, Solution Strategy Director at Dow Jones, spoke to our group
about Using Social Networking Tools in our Business. Ken showed us how we can make use of Linked
In, Facebook, etc. to help market our companies.
Monday, March 1, 2010 – Richard Kay spoke about Health Insurance for Small Businesses.
Richard Kay, owner of Health Insurance
Authority, located in Plainsboro.
Richard spoke about "The ABC's of Health Insurance for the Small
Business Owner". Among the questions he addressed were:
How do I qualify for a
Group Health Plan in NJ?
What do I qualify for if I am a Sole Proprietor?
What's the new buzz about
"consumer-driven" healthcare?
Why is NJ one of the
most expensive states for health insurance?
Yes, it was some bleak information for sole-proprietors. However, the new Heath Care Savings Account
sounds promising for healthy employees.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010 – Matthew Ma of Scientific
Works spoke to our group about intellectual property issues. Dr. Ma spoke
about practical intellectual property issues from unique perspective of
engineers. Matthew is an IEEE senior member, also the author of the book
"Fundamentals of Patenting and Licensing for Scientists and
Engineers", World Scientific, 2009. He is the founder of Scientific Works
(http://www.scientificworks.com)
that provides IP training for engineers/scientists and patent filing for
entrepreneurs and individual inventors.
December 2 2009 – Bob Carullo – of SMART and Drew Marshall - PJCF
presented what their organizations are doing to bring jobs to New Jersey (Bob)
and to Princeton area specifically (Drew).
They handed out vu-graphs on their organizations. Contact Fran if you would like copies.
November 4, 2009 – Dan
Crevina of BBB in Trenton, NJ
Mr
Crevina speaks to various groups on behalf of the Better Business Bureau to
pass along his ideas for best practices as well as warning small business
owners about the various hazards in running a business. Recently, Mr Crevina has heard from various
companies that were victims of Identity Theft.
Mr Crevina will speak to us about those difficulties and how to avoid
being targeted.
June 9, 2009 - Dolcey Chaplin Esq.
DoD Procurement
Dolcey navigated
us thru some of the government procurement process. She demonstrated an upgraded website at
Please check it
out for information on how to do business with the Federal Government
February
25, 2009 -Katherine Kish and Louis Wagman - Strengthening Central Jersey's
R&D Advantage - Recent Activity of Einstein's Alley
The goal of
Einstein's Alley is to create jobs and growth, encourage creativity and
entrepreneurship, and to make Central NJ the best place to live and to uild new
businesses using science and innovation to create value. Katherine Kish
and Louis Wagman will brought us up to date on recent activities and discussed
how their non-profit organization is encouraging the growth of R&D in our
neighborhood.
January 27, 2009: Topic “ A
tax break for your business today – tax-advantaged retirement plans for
consultants and small business”.
Speakers: Yuriah Bailey and Annie Wang.
Mr. Bailey of
Pioneer Investments and Annie Wang of Merrill Lynch lead us through an interesting
discussion of the Uni-K Retirement plan and how it has benefits when compared
to Traditional IRAs, SEPs and Roth IRA plans for business owners. Yuriah and Annie had presented some good
ideas on retirement planning.
December
1, 2008: Topic: Banking for Consultants and Small Businesses during this
financial crisis
Speaker: Mr. Thomas Lanigan
Mr. Lanigan is
Vice President of the Bank of Princeton and Hamilton Branch Manger. Mr
Lanigan has 30 years of banking experience.
Mr Lanigan has worked in small business banking, managed the branches at
regional and community banks, after starting his career as an auditor. He has
served with the United Way of Mercer County, his local planning board and Notre
Dame High School’s Development Council. Mr. Lanigan is a graduate of The
College of New Jersey and holds various insurance and securities licenses.
November 12, 2008 - Topic: “WHAT’S WHAT?
--- Patents? Copyrights?, Trademarks? Trade Secrets?”
Speaker: Mr. Clement A. Berard Jr.
Mr. Berard is an
attorney with Dann, Dorfman, Herrell and Skillman.
DDHS specializes in the practice of Patent, Trademark, Copyright, and
related Trade Secret and Unfair Competition Law, as well as domain name
matters, representing clients in the U.S., Japan, and Europe. Technological
strengths include mechanics, electronics, computers, chemistry, and
biotechnology.
Mr Berard gave a
lively talk about the present patent system as well as Copyrights, Trademarks
and Trade Secrets. Our attendees had
many questions answered.
April 30, 2008- Barry Meyers of The People Source
Group presented "Consulting 101, How to
Build a Successful Consulting Practice". This highly interactive
presentation
addressed marketing realities for consultants and the nine P's: Planning,
Product, Professionalism, Place, People, Price, Packaging, Promotion, and
Positioning. At the end, we all completed a 2-page Self-Assessment. Barry gave
numerous examples of each one of the 9 categories.
More info on
Barry Meyers and his company can be found at http://www.tpsgco.com
April 2, 2008 - Don Borcherding of NexSummit, LLC
Don
Borcherding of NexSummit, LLC will lead a discussion on how to develop more
products without more resources using a profiling method he developed called
RISQ. With RISQ you capture how
Responsive, Innovative, Strategic
More
info on Don
February 12, 2008: Snowed out
from meeting with Don Borcherding, however, four of us showed up for the
business card exchange. Thank you Joe
Levy and Gerhard Franz for some good ideas for our group, going forward.
December 10, 2007: With Business coach George Sierchio of Action
Business Partners Inc.
We had an informative meeting on December 10. George Sierchio of Action Business Partners
led us in a discussion on running a small business from getting more projects,
cutting down sales cycles, hiring/firing, to time management.
Mr. Sierchio is a successful engineer/IT business
owner that has spent the past 4 years specializing in coaching and advising
technical people that have jumped into business for themselves.
More info on George Sierchio and his company at: http://www.actionbusinesspartners.com
June 12, 2007: We had a successful Consultant’s Network meeting on
June 12 at 5:30 pm. During this meeting
about 10 consultants prepared and gave a 5 minute marketing presentation of
their service or product.
See link at <http://www.fxoinc.com/IEEE.htm>
for our upcoming
consultants network meeting schedule and past meeting notes.
Consultants who presented at this meeting:
1. Jim Faunce P.E. with Faunce Engineering
2. Pete Dimitrov-Kuhl with Optimized Photonic Systems, Inc.
3. Titi Trandafir with Juvent Medical
4. Raj Tumuluri with Openstream Inc
5. Mitchell M Kurinzi
Jr with Applied Technical And Administrative Services.
6. Tony Moore
7. Gerhard Franz of A.G. Franz Associates LLC.
8. Ross Dennis of
Clearsight Research
9. Warren Umholtz
10. Francis O’Connell with FXO Inc.
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Past Speakers:
Dolcey Chaplin from
Ms. Chaplin outlined for the group the
exciting opportunities available for getting federal contracts. Ms. Chaplin took us through the registration
process with the CCR (Central Contractor Registration) and how to be ready to
receive federal contracts. There is some
paperwork to do on our part. Dolcey’s
office is setup to help us do this registration and find out about what
contracts are out there.
A key hint we learned is to search the
websites of your potential military or federal government clients for various
topics that other contractors are working.
Usually when you see a request for proposal, the buyer already has a
vendor in mind. The key is to make
relationships with the buyers and tell them what your company can do. Ask to speak with a chief engineer and
assess what problems they need to solve.
Suggest your solutions. You will see that a few months later, a request
for information or proposal will come out almost tailored to what your company
can do.
Dolcey also spoke about the SBIR, Small
Business Innovation Research projects.
She suggested going for them.
Phase I awards are between $70K to $100K. If your ideas are good and you perform on
Phase I, you may be awarded a Phase II contract that could be $500K to $750K.
Dolcey handed out the current
information of key buyers in NJ and with the Federal Government. These are the people to contact.
Here is some further information about
the Defense Procurement Center and Dolcey’s contact information:
D.P.T.A.C.
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Darren Baldo, Esq. Attorney at Law from Lawrenceville, NJ
Mr. Baldo conducted a lively meeting by going over the pitfalls that are
waiting if you do any of the 10 biggest mistakes in running a business.
Including
- No contract review
- Not using a qualified attorney
- Not having enough insurance
- Using verbal contracts
- Failing to “stop the bleeding”
We
spent as much time on individual questions.
Mr Baldo was conversant in all small business details.
See
also http://www.ewh.ieee.org/r1/princeton-centraljersey/
for the latest in IEEE events.
Contact Fran
O’Connell, 609-799-6450 or fran_oconnell@fxoinc.com
with any questions.
August 17, 2006, Florence
Lau
From: Ballezzi and Associates (http://www.taxbeacon.com/ballezzi)
Topic: Coping with Taxes in your successful business.
We had a
successful seminar led by Florence Lau of Ballezzi and Associates. Florence led us through some of the new
accounting changes as well as some “heads up” things that every business owner
should be doing.
For example,
every business should put into their minutes every year memo to record that the
corporate officers had met and that there were the following changes, or no
changes, etc. Maybe put a comment in to
say that the corporate plans didn’t change and that there are no pending
lawsuits. Make sure this is done every
year. You may want to send a copy to your
accountant.
Florence spoke
about how to compute a Basis, your money in the company.
She then spoke
about Section 179 and how business assets up to $108,000 this year for a C-corp
may be deductible.
Florence
cautioned that the chief executives must take reasonable compensation. That is, you must take a payroll salary. Not all distributions.
The rules are
very generous for business owners to put up to 40% of their salary into 401K
and SEP programs. She suggested that we
take advantage of this.
Save all your
receipts…Corporations are exposed for 7 years.
Longer if there is any fraud or payroll related issues.
Don’t deduct Life
Insurance or Disability Insurance from the business. If you die, then the business will have to
pay the full tax on the distribution, and the real recipients will lose out.
A full time
employee is one who works a minimum of 25 hrs per week.
Finally, New
Jersey is really clamping down on the Use Tax.
You must file an NJ Use tax form every year by May 31. This is for items purchased out of state and
used in NJ that you didn’t pay tax on.
Florence had a client that got clobbered on this tax on some computers
he bought from Dell, and Dell didn’t charge sales tax.
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