Hi, I'm Diane Hendrickson.

Founder & President of BizFlint, Inc. - Business Training for the Trades

In my time teaching entrepreneurship at the community college level, my job was to bridge the gap between the Small Business Center and the trades and technical programs on campus. That's where I first started watching the trades students closely.

They were focused, skilled, and serious about learning their craft. But I kept thinking about what would happen when they graduated and hit the workforce. At some point, most of them would need to know how to run a business, whether they planned for it or not. Many would graduate into a world where they'd be independent contractors or business owners whether they were ready or not.

The problem was nobody was preparing them for that reality. Not in trade school. Not on the job site. The business training simply didn't exist for people in the trades.

So I set out to build it.

That program became BizFlint.

My dad's an electrician. So is my husband. My brother owns his own trades businesses. I grew up around the trades. I know what it looks like when a talented tradesperson bets everything on going out on their own, and I know what it costs when they don't have the foundation they need.

BizFlint is a business training system built specifically for tradespeople who are ready to build something real. Every lesson, every exercise, and every example speaks directly to the person who has spent years mastering a trade and is now ready to run a business of their own.

I'm not here to cheerlead or sell anyone a dream. I'm here to hand them a flashlight and walk through the real questions with them — the ones that actually determine whether their business makes it.

What I bring to this:

• Founder & President, BizFlint, Inc.
• Former entrepreneurship Instructor & Program Developer, Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College
• Director, Student Business Incubator, A-B Tech
• Director, Young Entrepreneurial Scholars Camp, A-B Tech
• Certified IceHouse Entrepreneurship Facilitator
• 25+ years building and operating businesses