New York SBDC Research Network

The Department of Veterans Affairs has put together something called Performance Based Interviewing . PBI "is a method to increase the effectiveness of the interviewing process in selecting and promoting quality staff. With PBI, the interviewer carefully defines the skills needed for the job and structures the interview process to elicit behavioral examples of past performance." One interesting feature is a bank of interview questions designed by the job function. Following each level is a sample question. Level I: Frontline staff, those who do not supervise others. "Give a specific example of a time you had to deal with an upset co-worker, patient, or other customer. What was the person upset about and how did you handle? What was the outcome?" Level II: Work unit leaders, those who lead the work of a natural group of people, either temporarily (process improvement team leader) or as an ongoing role (foreman, section leader). "A part of this job is documenting

We've mentioned this before (in June 2005, to be precise), but it bears repeating: If your local media/legislator/campus office contacts you for some immediate data regarding the state of small business, then here are some sites you can visit to get that information: SBA's Office of Advocacy is the primary resource regarding studies of national & state small business trends. On their home page, note a menu on the left-hand side titled "Research & Statistics". A number of links appear beneath that heading, including "State Economic Profiles" (which provides small business data for New York & other states for the individual years 2002-2006, inclusive). Other choices on this menu include "Data on Small Business" and "Owner Demographics," both of which lead to pages that cite reports written by Advocacy over the last several years on a wide variety of topics (including women in business, the availability of financing to smal

The New York Times had put most of their opinion columns and online archives behind a subscription wall and called it Times Select. It suddenly cost fifty smackers to access their columnists. Not this week. http://select.nytimes.com/pages/timesselect/index.html November 6-12, 2006

Polls are open from 6 a.m. to 9 p.m. on Tuesday, November 7. For more information, contact your local Board of Elections and/or the League of Women Voters .

The StreetWise Small Business Book of Lists: Hundreds of Lists to Help You reduce Costs, Increase Revenues, and Boost Your Profits. The broad sections in this book are: Starting Up, High Finance, Where you Work, Day-to-Day, Your Taxes, The Geek Section, Your Customers & Prospects, and Your People. That sounds like the usual rundown but each of these sections covers lists like: Ways to Find Your Start-up’s Niche in the Market Things to do Before Writing Your Government Proposal Most Common Home-Based Business Zoning Issues Questions to Ask When Interviewing and Individual Accountant Best Ways to Reduce Inventories Popular Voice Mail Systems Popular CRM Vendors for Enterprises Tips for creating Your Direct Mail List Just another good source to add to our repetoire.

Perhaps it is just my “nesting" instinct, but this apartment-dweller wants a house. For the time being, I’ll just have to settle for researching housing trends. To that end, here are a couple of good sites: Money Magazine has prepared several Top 10 lists on the real estate market, including which markets are forecasted to have the fastest growth, slowest growth, and highest and lowest home prices. This page also offers articles and advice on real estate topics. For more information on housing in this country, check out Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies . They offer some very useful full-text reports, including ‘The State of the Nation’s Housing, 2006,” “America’s Rental Housing, 2006” and “The Changing Structure of the Home Remodeling Industry, 2005.”

From the ghouls at the Census BOO-REAU: The observance of Halloween, which dates back to Celtic rituals thousands of years ago, has long been associated with images of witches, ghosts, devils and hobgoblins. In the United States, the first official citywide Halloween celebration occurred in Anoka, Minn., in 1921. Over the years, Halloween customs and rituals have changed dramatically. Today, many of the young and “young-at-heart” take a more light-spirited approach. They don scary disguises or ones that may bring on smiles when they go door-to-door for treats or attend or host a Halloween party. "Trick or Treat!" 36.1 million: The estimated number of potential "trick-or-treaters" in 2005 — 5- to 13-year-olds — across the United States , which declined by 284,000 from 2004. Of course, many other children — older than 13, and younger than age 5 — also go trick-or-treating. 108 million: Number of occupied housing units across the nation — all potential stops for "

The web-based version of the SBDC book "What's Your Signage?" is now up & running. It went live late last Friday. It can be found at http://www.whatsyoursignage.com . The site is a very compressed version of our 2004 book, and has two purposes. The first is to give small business owners a brief overview on the value of effective signs. Studies have shown that effective signage has a positive impact on sales. The second purpose of the site is to match small business owners with a sign company near them. The site was developed with a lot of help from the International Sign Association, and they're also letting us use their member database. Signage doesn't seem to elicit much of a response. It's not always something that is considered when our clients come to us, looking to improve their marketing reach. However, as a cost-effective & hard-working advertising mechanism for a business, it ought to be. Our website would be just the tip of the iceber

With a bit of a year-end shopping spree, we have updated a number of areas in our collection with titles that we imagined would interest our clientele given the type of requests we get. We have tried to focus on practical titles, many that deal with specific industries. There are a few books that are generally geared to small business owners, on marketing and business principles that are still very interesting. 3G Marketing on the Internet Bricks & Mortar: renovating or Building a Business Incubation Facility Conducting Research Surveys Via Email & the Web Dan Poynter’s Self Publishing Manual Drive a Modest Car& 16 Other Keys to Small Business Success Guerilla Marketing for Free How to Create a High Profit Photography Business Legal Research: How to Find and Understand the Law Making Money in the Fitness Business Organic, Inc. Patent, Copyright & Trademark Spa Business Strategies Start Your Own hair Salon & Day Spa Starting a Medical Practice The 7 Irrefutable Rul

Created by David Sheddon, Library Director at the Poynter Institute (a journalism school), this bibliography presents resources for those working in new media. Useful to anyone involved with internet publishing, or those just curious about the information sharing power of the Web. Links include various histories of the internet, guides to blogging, and internet trends, stats and demographics. There are lists of relevant books too.

I learn so much from being on certain listservs. For instance, from the Business Librarians' list, I've learned that: M1 Money supply = currency, demand deposits, checkable deposits, and travelers checks M2 money supply = M1 + savings deposits, small time deposits, and money market mutual funds M2 is the more accepted total and is always much larger than M1. Information on this is released weekly here . Historical data can be found here . Information can also be found here and here , though I find the latter, because of the format, to be less useful. Small business folks probably won't be asking about these things, but you may have a relationship with economic development folks or others who may wish to know. Another tidbit I learned are the definitions of a building's floor space: Gross floor area - "The total area of all the floors of a building, including intermediately floored tiers, mezzanine, basements, etc., as measured from the exterior surfaces of the ou

StateHealthFacts.org is a website that enables you to view data for any state in the U.S., and see how it compares to the rest of the country. As its name would suggest, the site focuses heavily on presenting health-related data (e.g., level of insurance coverage, Medicare spending, general health measures, etc.). It also has a broad category called "Demographics and the Economy," which might be applicable to a broader variety of clients (and not just those working in the healthcare field).

In honor of the season, how about some baseball business? On this Forbes site, MLB teams are ranked according to current value, revenue and operating income. There are also graphs of historical value for each team. Not into baseball? Try the business of football , basketball , hockey or soccer .

When I first started as a librarian a little over a dozen years ago, someone showed me these thick volumes that listed virtually all of the lawyers in the country, designating their specialty. It was one of those resources that begged to be accessed electronically. In time, the Martindale-Hubbell database appeared online, and for free. I'm reminded of this because one of our SBDC clients, aware of the resource, was not finding what she wanted. I suspect that she was using the Basic Search mode, which I personally find clunky. I prefer the Advanced mode, where I can select lawyers by city/county/state, and by areas of practice. I'd be inclined to select "lawyer" rather than "law firm", because the lawyer selection will identify the law firm.

Shop.org describes itself as an "association for retailers online". One of the features of its website is a cool compendium of links that provide helpful statistics regarding online retailing . As you'll soon see, categories studied on this page include "US Internet Usage," "US Online Shoppers," "Vertical Markets," "E-Business Trends," and a few others. Keep it handy when advising your e-commerce clientele.