About Venture Advisory Services
Since 1989, Venture Advisory Services has helped develop over 600 successful businesses. These have ranged from part-time, home-based businesses to mid-sized companies. Working with clients of vocational rehabilitation and economic development agencies is our specialty. To see the types of businesses we've worked with, click here. Venture Advisory Services is based in Seattle, and offers face-to-face services throughout Washington. Thanks to telephones, email, and web-cams we provide business consultation and vocational services throughout the U.S.
Philosophy
Creativity, practicality, and sensitivity are our basic service tenets. Supporting the ability of people to improve the quality of their lives through self employment is our goal, since the flexibility of self employment can provide a viable employment option for someone with a disability or work injury, and it be a way for a person who is on public assistance or underemployed to break out of a cycle of minimum wage and temporary jobs. A part-time business can supplement retirement or disability income. Believing in the value of self employment means that we are critical evaluators of business plans and funding proposals, since we believe the best way to promote self employment is to increase the success rate of small businesses.
History
Venture Advisory Services started as a program of the Alliance of People with disAbilities to promote the option of self employment in the field of vocational rehabilitation. When grant funding ended, the program staff decided to strike out on their own. Of the original partners, Christopher Carnrick was recruited to work as a vocational rehabilitation counselor with the Division of Vocational Rehabilitation in Washington, worked as Assistant Director of Human Resources for a biomedical research corporation, and now operates a catering and property management business in Torrox Pueblo, Spain. Carolyn Edmonds decided to leave the company after the birth of her second child, later became involved with political campaigning, and is a former King County Councilperson. Kathy Reichgerdt, director of the original project, has continued the business, employing various people and specialists to assist, as needed.
About the Owner
Kathy Reichgerdt has over thirty years experience working directly with people starting small businesses. She has a wealth of knowledge on an exceptionally wide range of industries, and specializes in helping people start home-based and family businesses. Most of Kathy's work in the past 20 years has been with displaced workers, people with disabilities, women, immigrants, and others who decide that self employment is their best way to make a living or supplement a fixed income. She has firsthand experience in the fields of consulting, wholesale food distribution, property management, retailing, and non-profit management, and has helped clients research and develop hundreds of business ideas. When she doesn't know something about a particular type of business, she knows where to find the information. She is knowledgeable about Social Security and other regulations that affect earned income for people with disabilities and retirees.