Growth Acceleration Services

Growth services offer you results-driven benefits

Accelerate the growth of your business with no-cost services designed to provide substantial business consulting to qualified businesses.

Our certified business consultants are available to assist your business in a variety of areas, through in-depth consulting sessions. Growth Acceleration Services enables business owners to:

• Find new market opportunities
• Uncover hidden profits
• Create sustainable growth

How It Works

Upon verification of eligibility and initial consultation, a dedicated consultant will:

• Conduct an in-depth business assessment and on-site visit
• Develop sustainable growth strategies, including:
  
  • shoring up financial practices
  • accessing capital
  • determining market diversification tactics
  • developing strategic business plans
• Prepare a Business Health Assessment Report
• Consult confidentially as necessary to implement recommendations

Qualifications

To be eligible for this no-cost service, qualified small businesses must:

• Have a goal for growth
• Be in business for at least 3 years
• Have 5 or more full-time employees
• Have at least $500,000 in sales
• Be willing to submit related financial, marketing and operations documents

Frequently Asked Questions

Consultant

• Linda Benedict

  Florida SBDC at USF

  Specialty: Growth Acceleration

  A New York licensed attorney, Linda Benedict graduated with a certificate in community development and taught business law and employment law at the college level. She has a master’s in business administration with more than 15 years of business experience and worked with more than 300 businesses. As director of the Business and Community Development Division of a community action agency, she taught pre-venture and start-up entrepreneurs how to start their businesses and showed established small businesses how to successfully grow their bottom line and market their products and services. Raising community and political support, she created a business development center that served a three-county area. After realizing that small businesses in the service area were not being offered business loans, she successfully created and directed a lending Institution. Benedict was a founding member of MicroBizNY, New York State’s first statewide association supporting microbusinesses. She has been a presenter on the needs of small businesses to the Association for Enterprise Opportunity (AEO) and the New York Department of Labor. In addition, she owned a business consulting company specializing in teaching businesses how to successfully market their services.

  
  

• Pat Gordon

  

  Florida SBDC at USF

  Specialty: Growth Acceleration

  As a growth acceleration specialist with the FSBDC at USF, Pat Gordon is focused on assisting existing businesses to find new opportunities, uncover hidden profits and create sustainable growth. For more than 20 years, she led an IT consulting and staffing firm which grew from $750k in annual revenues to more than $40 million in yearly sales during her tenure. The company branched out from the Miami area and ultimately earned the status of primary and preferred supplier to several major clients in the oil and gas industry in Houston and across the border in Canada. Gordon has her bachelor’s in communications from the University of Buffalo and her master’s in business administration. from Canisius College. As an entrepreneur, she owns a seasonal fishing lodge near the Adirondack Mountains of New York and has a small used car dealership in Florida. She is also a part-time adjunct instructor of economics, business and operations management.