Owner and Business Consultant, CompasScale

>> My name is Jerry Mason. I am a graduate of Rutgers College class of 1980. I am President of an organization called Compascale [assumed spelling]. What Compascale is is a management and investment consultancy and what I do is I help the management teams of entrepreneurial, early stage and distress companies with human capital, IT, sales and operations issues. A day looks like for me-so I built my career on, or I built Compascale around two areas. One is what I call my for profit practice, which is helping organizations sustain themselves and build and the other is my volunteer practice where I help individuals sustain themselves. So there's two side by side paths that I have; building businesses to sustainability and building individuals to sustainability, specifically students and job seekers. So a day is a lot of phone work, a lot of interpersonal interactions with clients and then a lot of work with students and job seekers. My business is all word of mouth. I've been a corporate executive, an entrepreneur and a turnaround management consultant for 30 years. I started my practice five years ago so I am very selective about the type of clients I look for. They actually come to me, I vet them and if we have a good connection we go to the dance. First meeting is generally vetting. First of all I want to get a sense as to where the business wants to go. If it's an early stage business that wants to grow, I want to understand the capacity and capabilities of the management team, usually it's a founder, I want to understand what their mission is, what their goal is, what are the impediments to their vision and what are the enablers for their vision. I then put together a plant to be able to address the impediments and to improve upon the enablers. So initially what we do is we first of all understand what the business plan is and then specifically, because I borrow in very deeply into my clients, I need to make sure there's a fit between myself and the client.