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Mission: To enhance opportunities for people with disabilities to succeed at self-employment.
UWISE.BIZ provides a unique menu of services to help individuals--especially those with disabilities--take the steps necessary to assess, research, plan, start, and operate their businesses successfully. The following self-employment services for individuals can be purchased individually, in a step-by-step fashion, or in a multi-service package tailored to your needs:
- Discovery
- Initial Assessments of Self-employment Readiness and Feasibility of Business Idea
- Benefits Analysis and Planning Based on Self-employment Rules
- One-on-One Help Writing a Business Plan
- Mentoring
- Help Writing a PASS
- Books, Bookkeeping, Reporting, and Tax Preparation
Our customers for the above services are private-pay prospective entrepreneurs or entities with funds to assist eligible individuals explore and pursue self-employment can authorize our services as third-party payers.
We also offer consultation, policy research, and training to agencies and organizations that serve people with disabilities to help enhance their abilities to work effectively with their clients and consumers involved with self-employment.
Each of the services we offer was specifically designed to provide types of help that are not available via other resources--Small Business Administration, Small Business Development Centers, SCORE (Service Corps of Retired Executives), the Women's Business Center, etc. For example, many of those we've assisted in the past had received good information through consultations or had taken courses from one or more of these traditional business experts, but hadn't been able to translate that information into their own business planning process. The step-by-step, one-on-one method we developed has been working over the past three plus years to take the mystery out the business research and planning process for prospective business owners, as well as other service providers, families, or team members they may be working with. We help you drill down into the specifics of your business idea and assist you to focus in, tackle the research, be realistic about feasibility, "test drive" your business, and write a business plan that meets the needs of any financing entity you want to approach.
For prospective entrepreneurs with disabilities who receive Social Security Disability Insurance or Supplemental Security Income, Medicare, Medicaid, Food Stamps, housing assistance, veterans benefits, and/or Workers Compensation, UWISE.BIZ provides invaluable help with benefits planning based on self-employment rules. These benefits can help in important ways to support the individual until their business becomes profitable enough that they no longer need to receive them. However, losing benefits accidentally, prematurely can doom a business to failure or worse. Our benefits planning service is, once again, designed to fill a gap. Utah has available free benefits planning services through the Benefits Planning Assistance and Outreach (BPAO/WIPA) program that gives excellent help and advice to beneficiaries exploring or engaging in wage work. However, many of the self-employment rules for programs are quite different from the rules that apply to income earned at a wage job and self-employment rules differ from one program to another. Not only that, but benefits planning needs to be integrated into the business planning process and that takes business expertise. We are trained and experienced in benefits planning and business. We have spent three years researching and working with self-employment program rules while providing benefits planning and assistance to people we have been helping research, plan, and begin to operate their businesses.
Please look around in our website to learn more about the services we offer―to both individuals and agencies―our experience and qualifications, how we make these services available, who we collaborate with, and more. Please don't leave without visiting The Mall, a new, web-based opportunity for entrepreneurs with disabilities to make their businesses known, especially to people who would like to support businesses owned by people with disabilities.
Contact us if you have any questions or if you'd like a free consultation to discuss some of the details about how we might work together.
