Q. What is SCORE?

A. It used to be called Service Core of Retired Executives, which many people know. But that's not our name anymore. Our tagline is "Counselors for America's Small Business," and the reason we changed it is many of our people are not retired. In fact, some are working full time and this is their volunteer work. Plus, the image was a bunch of old guys sitting around and advising people when in fact many of us are much, much younger than that. So it's counselors for small businesses.

Q. How does SCORE work?

A. Basically, people phone our office, talk to our secretary, Jean Jeramiah, and she asks them a number of questions. What's your name, contact information, do you have a company, and if so, what do you do? If you don't, what help would you like us to provide you? She'll look through our inventory of counselors and hopefully come up with a perfect match for that person. Then they'll schedule a meeting between the client and the counselor. The first meeting typically takes an hour and we encourage people to come back for more if it's been helpful. We encourage people, if they don't already have a business plan, to absolutely prepare a business plan because we are firm believers that every business needs to have a business plan.

Q. Do you help them prepare the plan?

A. We don't believe that we should prepare people's business plans because I'm sure you've seen business plans that are just sitting on a shelf somewhere and they say, "Well, who made that?" or, "Our consultants wrote this plan and I don't really know what's in it." So we really insist that the owner do the preparation of the business plan. We help them with guidelines, we tell them about software that's available, and if they do a good start and genuinely are working on it, we make ourselves available to help them. Sometimes, people are troubled with the financial part and we'll help them with that. We'll definitely help them along the way as long as they're making a sincere effort to do it themselves.

Q. How big a pool of volunteers do you have?

A. On O'ahu, we have 30 volunteers, 20 of whom are active counselors. Some of the 10 are volunteers who are helping us develop our business. We are running a business. It's a not-for-profit, but it is a business and we need to run it professionally just like a business. We have various committees, and some are working on the committees and not doing counseling. On Maui, there are about 10 volunteers. We have one in Kona, one in Hilo and one on Kaua'i.

Q. How did you get involved?

A. I was recruited by a wonderful guy who's still active, Richard Hoag, who came to a business networking organization that I belonged to five years ago. He was telling everyone about SCORE and said would anyone be interested. I was familiar with SCORE on the Mainland, so I said, "OK, I'll try that out."

Q. Are you looking for more volunteers?

A. We're always looking for more clients, and that's why we need more counselors. My goal is to double our size of volunteers by the end of our fiscal year, which is next Sept. 30. We're going to do it and we have to do it because we have some skills that we lack, and we need backups. We need more IT people, we need more HR people, you name it, and we can use more people with that expertise.

Q. Being a nonprofit, you don't have much of an advertising budget. How will you do your recruiting?

A. I started this job Oct. 1, and about a month before that, one of our best counselors and a longtime friend of mine and one that I recruited had to move to Georgia to take care of his sister. He said, "I've got my replacement and his name is Doug Harris." I'd never heard of him, but I said tell me how to reach him and I'll give him a call. I invited him to lunch and by the end of lunch, Doug said, "I've decided I'm going to devote my next 24 months of volunteer service to SCORE Hawai'i." He's a marketing guy and said, "Would it be OK if I bring some of my employees to get involved in the process as volunteers?" We had a meeting of all these employees, and about five vendors of Doug's company decided to volunteer their services for the same length of time. So we have a combined marketing/fundraising committee now. This is all pretty new, so you got to realize how excited I am about this whole process. At the last meeting, there were 22 people at this marketing/fundraising committee. You can expect to see us big-time soon.

Q. How many clients does SCORE see each year?

A. Maybe a thousand.

Q. Do they have common concerns and questions?

A. There are some people who have a gleam in their eye about a company that they think they might want to start. This is really down to the basics. We can help them go to the Business Action Center and we have a really good working relationship with them. They can help people get business licenses and register their trademark and all this stuff. Then there are some who come in who have a business and want to get it to the next level and need help in marketing or finance and we help them with that. Sometimes we work with some pretty experienced and established companies.

Q. Do you still work, or is SCORE your full-time job?

A. I retired from Morgan Stanley at the end of 1999. I joined Dean Whitter in 1980, which then turned into Morgan Stanley. This is my job now and of course we're not paid. But I've kind of cleared the decks. I don't have any other major responsibility with any other not-for-profit. I'm really devoting a lot of attention to SCORE. We've got a big team of really talented people and we're all working together as a team.

Q. What is most rewarding for you?

A. From the counseling point of view, when an hour session starts, in my mind, I'm going to give this person at least 10 good ideas that they didn't have before. It's tremendously satisfying. Some of my favorite ones phone me up the next day or the next week and say they took scrupulous notes, and these are the best clients. You know that they're seriously thinking and listening and writing stuff down and then they follow up and they say, "Here's what I did with this person and here's what I did with that person." That makes me feel good. The other thing that turns me on about this organization and the role I have right now is we're really building an organization. We've been around for quite a few years, but up until recently we haven't been professionally organized. We now have four really active committees, and most of our members are on at least one. So we're really organized in that way that will enable us to grow really well. My biggest challenge is to manage the expected rapid growth of SCORE because that's hard to do, and to double the size in one year, we've got to carefully manage this thing so we maintain our quality and maintain our relationship with one another.

Reach Curtis Lum at culum@honoluluadvertiser.com.