The Plan

Here is my initial concept minus a discussion with an attorney and minus a business plan! So take this with a grain of salt. I also read somewhere once that your customers will eventually be the one's that tell you what you business will do!

1. Contracting/Consulting – Leverage my connections to bring work in for myself and others. The range goes from at the lowest level VHDL and the highest level Emdedded Linux development. This is the bread and butter, Contracting, Subcontracting and Consulting. This will pay the bills.

2. Firmware Engineer Resources and Services – My site will have a membership capability. Once you are a member you have access to networking with other engineers, posting contract work you are aware of, seeing job listings, getting access to discounts for tools, training and seminars and so on.

3. Training and Seminars – I’m working right now with some big names to bring them to Cleveland to hold cyclical seminars. I have a meeting next week with someone from a local training company to discuss revenue sharing, as well as finders fee’s for me bringing in students from my website to classes. So in general I want to work to bring in more talent into the area. If Dan has good success, I think we have a shot at making this a long term endeavor with other talent as well.

4. FENEO – How this ties in is still vague but implicit. I can see FENEO being a local branch of members of USA Firmware. The issue is that the way I have it structured right now; I receive donations for IEEE Cleveland Computer Society. I usually foot the bill and send the donations to IEEE. They then receive my receipt and reimburse me. So for me to have this be part of my business, FENEO will have to change in its financial structure or something. Otherwise it will have to come directly out of membership fee’s and my income. I’m going to talk to my attorney on this one as it’s tricky.

5. Finder’s Fee’s – So I am heavily connected on both ends, from the recruiter side and the engineer side. I hope to bring in revenue through finders fee’s by making jobs accessible to my members but not making my members accessible to recruiters. I can also see using the funds from this to help out with FENEO events. So a portion of the finders fee could go to the event or could go to IEEE if I can somehow maintain this relationship to FENEO without a conflict of interest.

6. USA Firmware Franchise – This is an interesting idea I think and I’m looking forward to discussing this with my attorney. So the above could be done anywhere. But obviously I can’t do all this well from Cleveland if say we want to repeat this model in central Ohio. So I would francise out the USA Firmware ‘brand’. FENEO being one franchise and