Skills Project Location of Resources

¶ … Skills Project

Location of Resources

Evaluation of Resources

Business Plan Mind Map

There are many avenues to starting, acquiring and building a small business. From the entrepreneurs who start their businesses from an extra room in their homes to those that purchase franchisees, all share a common set of information needs that range from an assessment of their skill sets to financing and legal implications including zoning laws. The intent of this analysis is to evaluate the information sources available to aspiring entrepreneurs and assist with their search for information and guidance in this area. A mind map of a typical business plan is also provided and shown in Appendix A. The structure and keywords of the mind map form the foundation of this analysis.

Problem Statement

The decision of whether to start a business or not is a multifaceted, complex one. The mind map shown in Appendix A graphically portrays how diverse the information needs are. Starting with a definition of the type of business, the definition of the business model, key points of differentiation and key stakeholders and advisors all need to be defined. Small businesses that can define business models that innately have differentiation of services and solutions included within them stand a better chance of surviving (Spence, Essoussi, 2010). There is unfortunately no single roadmap or formula for defining the extent of differentiation in one business model relative to another. Relying on secondary data in the industry of choice for a new business can provide insights into which aspects of differentiated business models have worked or not. Following the business model, the coordinating of products and services, manufacturing, production and operations, marketing, industry analysis and financial management all form the foundation of any small business. Each of these functional areas also require expertise and insight to ensure they align with all other functions and strategies of a small business (Gaskill, Hyland, 1989). Entrepreneurs opt for a franchisee model to invest in, as these functional areas are managed centrally by a franchise owner, reducing risk (Williams, 1991). Given the popularity of the franchisee model there is an abundance of data sources and research available on this topic (Buzza, Mosca, 2009) (Justis, Chan, 1993). The research completed on entrepreneurship and starting a small business showed a heavily slanted focus towards franchising and comparable small business investment strategies that minimize risk.

Location of Resources

All resources were found using the following academic databases. ABI/Inform was used for many of the cited articles in this analysis and proved to have over five hundred documents on small business franchising alone, including how to mitigate risks. The EBSCO Host database was also used for the analysis of business plans and the assessment of small and medium business brand building (Spence, Essoussi, 2010). Lexus/Nexus was used for an analysis of the small business entrepreneurship market and for insights into how a business plan is structured for start-ups and also for insight into the legal issues surrounding new businesses as well. These parameters were used for finding a mind map that is representative of this area.

Evaluation of Resources

The ABI Inform database was the most heavily skewed towards franchise-based content and appeared to be highly focused on magazines and periodicals on the subject. There was a small percentage of the franchisee materials from peer-reviewed articles and no dissertations cited in the searches done. ABI Inform was also very useful when queried on the topic of small business models and small business planning documents. It also had documents and dissertations on small business failure rates and empirically derived studies explaining the factors behind this occurring (Justis, Chan, 1993). ABI Inform also did not have coverage of the legal issues facing entrepreneurs in Australia, yet did have coverage of shared risk mitigation through global joint ventures. The content on ABI Inform from the legal standpoint of start-ups was strategic in scope than practical.

EBSCO Host was much more balanced in its content with regard to entrepreneurship vs. franchising, and had a greater breadth of industry profiles of small business by country. The revived interface from EBSCO Host, now just under a year old, made the parsing of queries much easier and intuitive. The use of a suitcase like feature also made the storage of documents much simpler than the ABI Inform's approach to storing documents of interest as well. There is also a new citation feature, which made getting information about any article of interest much more streamlined. The queries in EBSCO Host could also be defined according to the taxonomy of the business plan model shown in Appendix A as well. The shortcomings were that EBSCO Host did not always support downloadable documents and did not always support preview as well. Yet despite these limitations, the ability to selectively define search by category and the intuitive timelines helped to make the overall search process much simpler. As a result of the EBSCO Host flexibility, much greater levels of insight and intelligence were gained on the failure rates of entrepreneurs, why they failed, and what the rates where if franchises as well (Justis, Chan, 1993).