Small Business Consulting Certification - SBA

A 10-day on-site training program for business consultations hosted by the SBA and taught by seasoned consultants from each functional area of business.

During the course, I turned the entire program into a wiki and shared it on our Slack channel, but I was told to remove it, as it “undermined the value of the training.”

While most of the lectures were truly snooze-worthy, the one-on-one conversations I had with each of the highly insightful and well skilled instructors was worth the price of admission, mostly because HR paid for it.

Scrum Master Certificate of Preparation - Project Management Institute

Agile Project Management was the name of the game at Orange Cube Group, and I learned the principles from YouTube. When the SBDC required a written continuing education plan, I took the SCRUM Master Certification course in an afternoon to get HR off my back.

That same HR department wouldn't pay the $700 for the test, and I wasn't about to pay for someone else to tell others what I've been practicing for a decade.

Competent Communication Toastmaster International

A public speaking and communication certificate which I secured during my time with Toastmasters. In all honesty, I wrote most of my speeches in the parking lot 10 minutes before class and left my local group for the regional leadership group within a few months for better business networking opportunities.

While most of my peers plaster their offices with framed certificates, I've found them mostly worthless compared to lived experiences. Many of these certificates I obtained on a Friday afternoon at the brewery down the street from my office, so that I could wave them in front of a client who was suffering from a case of credentialism.

Since I was four years old, I have picked something I wanted to learn about and taught myself. While I grew up in the internet age, I was also raised in a cult and didn’t have unfiltered internet access until college.

This means I spent time at the old-fashioned library, learning from peers, reading the newspaper, and gathering whatever bits of information I could from online sources that weren't blocked by filtering software on the computers I had access to (which, you bet, I hacked around).

Starting with small operations and growing into Orange Cube Group, I have owned and run many business ventures. This has forced me to learn mostly by trial and error much of what I know. While my bachelor's degree was explicitly in business development, it pales in comparison to what I learned in my first year of business.

As an enabler, I’ve worked with 2000+ businesses over the last decade, and I’ve learned both from them, with them, and, on bad days, at their expense.