Information resources for aspiring entrepreneurs starting small businesses

¶ … 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.

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).

The quality of the information for creating a business plan came from EBSCO Host and was verifiable through several queries of that database. The fact that small business plans need to have greater agility and flexibility in them was made in several of the researched sources, with the article found by an actual small business owner citing his experiences being the best (Buzza, Mosca, 2009).

In conclusion, there is a significant difference in quality of content between databases used to capture research of interest. ABI Inform has a highly slanted content base towards franchising, most likely due to the magazines and published newspaper articles that form the majority of their content. EBSCO Host however was configurable to support queries across the Wall Street Journal, all peer-reviewed articles that carried small business content and as a result was much more balanced and useful, providing more effective information sources.