Elhussien Ahmed, our speaker on January 25, is an entrepreneur who began envisioning opening a café in 2014. He connected with Filicori Zecchini in Bologna, Italy to become one of their United States franchisees. The shop is the site of our monthly board meetings.
Elhussien described the ups and downs of starting a business in Montgomery County. His original business plan envisioned a six-month period for building out the coffee shop; it took two years. He stuck with it, and is close to being profitable and hopes to open additional shops in the near future.

John Pfaehler, a law enforcement wellness advocate, is an officer of the Rockville Police Department currently on long-term leave in order to work on a suicide prevention program for police officers. Badge of Life estimates that two to three times more officers kill themselves than are directly killed by others, a subset of those who die in the line of duty. More broadly, Badge of Life promotes psychological survival for police officers.

John described his current work, which includes setting up a new organization, Healing the Blue LLC, which has a new website, https://www.healingthebluellc.com/. The site provides services for police officers including training, wellness programs and access to social media resources for police agencies.

The manager and investigative programs administrator of Montgomery County’s Office of Consumer Protection, Tracy gave us a fast-moving and informative talk about cybersecurity and identity theft. She said that identity thefts are raking in millions of dollars from various tricks played on unsuspecting citizens. In particular, she mentioned email frauds (with links from email messages), and telephone scams. She said to maintain strict control of your social security number, to never click on emails from unknown sources and to avoid downloads of “free” offers and interactive Facebook surveys.
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