Small Business in Small Towns

On Monday a group of business students will come together for a week long field trip. The trip will travel through 15 different western Washington cities starting with Sultan, Monroe and Snohomish in Snohomish County.

The object of the trip is to gather small business data from similar business types in each city. All the data will be combined into several categories and then the process (if successful) will be replicated around the region.

The small questionnaire involves simple yes – no or no answer questions such as; is your business growing, do you like your location, do you have too much regulation and do you consider your city business friendly. There are 15 questions total and the business names and owners’ answers will be kept confidential, only the resulting statistics will be released.

The data should show how small business is actually doing and how they feel they’re doing. A success and happiness gage for each city and county if all goes as expected.

The resulting data would look like; 65% of surveyed businesses say they would locate in the same spot if given the choice or 45% think the city is doing all it can to help small business.

The students are releasing only portions of what they’re doing to help encourage business owners to cooperate but not enough to allow skewed results or requests to be one of the businesses chosen to participate in the study.

All in all it should paint an interesting picture of how small business sees their environment currently and looking forward. The study results may be available as soon as June 13th according to the information that was provided.