March 2003
Newsday.com

"Guiding His Skills to a Dot-Com Biz"
By Patricia Kitchen

At first blush, Jim Malone may not strike you as the quintessential dot-com executive, yet that's just what he's become in retirement. A guidance counselor at Harborfields High School in Greenlawn, he took voluntary retirement six years ago at age 55, planning to expand his side business of career counseling and continue as an adjunct professor at the C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, where he helped train other counselors.

But then came a call from Randy Miller, an entrepreneur with dreams of starting a Web business. And following an exploratory conversation at a hotel coffee shop near Penn Station, the direction of Malone's retirement altered drastically.

He worked with Miller to start ReadyMinds.com, a site that provides one-on-one distance career counseling. For a fee, those looking for direction get phone calls, Web sessions and a follow-up report from one of about 50 counselors around the country. Among the organizations that have signed on: the University of California, Los Angeles, for its alumni; Long Island University's Brooklyn Campus, for its graduate students; and the Consortium for Worker Education, for displaced workers.

"It was new," says Malone. "I love to be part of a new thing. I wanted to challenge myself." And what came along with that challenge? The need to become "cyber-literate" in a hurry. Developing the content was a cinch, he says. But incorporating that with the technology was a steep learning curve. After taking a class, getting coached by his company's techies and just learning by doing, he says, his skills "grew exponentially."

Malone's job now is to review client information and match clients with counselors, whom he trains personally in distance counseling techniques.

Others contemplating a Web-based business who need to get up to speed with the technology can certainly take classes, he says. But his favored route is working one-on-one with young people who can show you the ropes.

If you've been noodling around a Web-business idea, be sure to keep your costs low, says Ken Cassar, a senior analyst with Jupiter Research, an online market research company. "There's no need to invest tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in technology."

Want to start an online store? He suggests looking into Yahoo.com, which, for a monthly fee and percentage of sales, will help you develop and set one up. (Under "small business" click on "store building.")

Malone puts in an average of 40 hours a week on ReadyMinds work, which leaves him plenty of time to go antiquing and take long walks on the winding, country roads in upstate Canandaigua, where he and his wife relocated three years ago. They bought a 150-year-old, 11-room Gothic Revival home, where, he says, "I can sculpt my own day."

For those contemplating retirement? "Find something that brings zest and joy into each day," he says. That might be a new facet of the work you already do. Or it may be "revisiting some dream deferred."