Advisory Board

Vincent J. Vicari is the Regional Director of the Bergen County Small Business Development Center (SBDC). As Regional Director, Mr. Vicari has leveraged his private and public sector successes to lead the New Jersey Small Business Development Center serving Bergen County New Jersey.

Vince Vicari is a Bergen County native who joined the NJSBDC network in 2008 after a successful and wide-ranging career in retail management, sales, food service, higher education and consulting. His credentials include an M.B.A. from National University in San Diego, a B.A. from William Paterson College, and an A.A.S. from Bergen Community College. Mr. Vicari continues to upgrade his knowledge base with education in land surveying, tax, technology, and international trade.

Mr. Vicari has increased the profile of the SBDC by enjoining private and public industry stakeholders to attract Bergen County regional business clients, provide services focused on population diversity, and improve the business and political positioning of the center to service traditional and non-traditional clients including an unique focus on US veterans populations. The outcome of these strategies is an expansion of service area for the SBDC due to increased funding partner awareness and reliance, industry referrals and client attraction. The Bergen SBDC is hosted at the AACSB accredited Anisfield School of Business at Ramapo College of New Jersey. “It is the staff of the local centers and the support of a central headquarters which provides the foundation of a successful center and to serve citizens of New Jersey from the SBDC vantage point, and to be selected for State Star is an honor”, Vincent Vicari.

Kathleen Cronin serves as the Head of Outreach at the New Jersey Small Business Development Center in Bergen County, where she has worked to provide small business owners with no-cost business management counseling and information services. Bergen County is approximately 14 miles outside of Manhattan and touts a population of nearly one million residents. As the Head of Outreach at the center in Bergen County, Kathleen has been on the front lines in the fight to save the small business community in the NY-NJ region during the COVID-19 era.

She has played a key role in governing the operations of the center. She helped launch the center’s Economic Recovery Task Force Initiative, which led to the creation of 8 Economic Recovery Task Forces to aid small businesses during the NY-NJ region’s economic recovery period. These economic recovery teams are composed of Ramapo College’s top academic performers, presidential scholarship recipients, members of the dean’s list, and various other students from extremely varied academic backgrounds. Each task force is led by a professional SBDC Business Management Consultant, who takes the lead on client interfacing activities. Each task force, which specializes in matters ranging from accounting to life sciences to financial services, is equipped to help business owners in every sector of the economy throughout the NY-NJ region come back from the COVID-19 crisis. To date, the task forces have provided thousands of hours of service to small businesses in helping them navigate the economic downturn.