Is there a market matching speakers/educators with conference organizers?

Hi, Doing lunch and learns is a great way to get the word out about your business. Here's the catch; who are you selling to? Employees may be very interested in what you have to say but do they get to make decisions on how training budgets are spent? It's a real question. In some businesses maybe yes, maybe no. People who are independent sales reps or commission-based may be more amenable to what you're offering. Think of real estate agents, independent sales reps, etc. They have the mindset of running their own business and may be interested in making an investment if you can demonstrate a return on their investment. If you're chasing corporate business, maybe a lunch and learn in a neutral locale is the answer and invite training managers or HR types from many different businesses to attend. Also, you need to question whether people will want a weekend retreat. In my experience, entrepreneurs and the self-employed like weekend events because it doesn't cut into business time. Employees prefer weekday events because they view the weekend time as their personal time. I hope this helps a little. Dave

It's hard to tell from your question what you have / don't have. Do you have an MVP? Do you have people using the 'discovery tool' yet? It will be hard to get any restaurant to pay you anything unless you have a deployed MVP already. You'll need to show them actual data of the value of your tool. To do that you need people to be using it to find restaurants. So put restaurants into your tool without the restaurants necessarily paying anything for the listing. Once you have traffic you can start charging the restaurants for certain features. That doesn't mean you should wait until your MVP is done before talking to restaurants though. To develop your MVP you should be visiting restaurants and talking to them about whether the features you're currently working on would be something they're actually interested in, and ask them open ended questions that may bring up ideas that you hadn't even thought of. If you'd like more specific advice on the types of questions to ask, or what the restaurants might want to see in terms of MVP data, or general MVP development help, let me know, best, Lee

I think your best bet for an answer has three answers, 1. You need to take the time and call around, no one is going to do this for free for you. 2. Hire a function planner, and let them do the work 3. go to Zirtual.com, and hire a person to do all that research for you, and get your answer. In the end, your question is really a job request, and you should be browsing through the people on this site who may do that kind of work and hire them.

Keep me posted. I'm interested.

You must be very careful about this type of loan, as doing this wrong can have profound tax effects. This is called imputed interest penalty. So the IRS can determine a loan was paid back incorrectly + ascribe some random interest rate, then require you pay back taxes + penalties on whatever rate they make up. Best way to deal with loans - Avoid any fancy nonsense. If you make a loan to your company, really make a loan. This means you have a note with market rate interest, so if you write a loan with 1% interest, this likely won't pass an audit. Make the loan match market rates you'd get at a bank for a similar loan. Also make sure your loan is less than usury rates in your state. For me, in Texas US, this is 18%, so if I write a loan to someone for more than 18%/year, I can end up in court via a suit brought by the state's attorney general. Summary: When making a long, make a real loan, with a correctly written promissory note. Exception: If you're using Transfer Pricing + locating your IP (intellectual property) in a different jurisdiction than where you pay tax, then you have many additional tax optimization strategies available. Real Example: Last time I checked, Google's IP is held by a Bermuda IDC + licensed to other countries for use. This means licensing agreements can be modified on the fly, to move any profits out of any country to Bermuda, where corporate tax rate is 0%... so profits can be expatriated to Bermuda, so no tax is paid.