Where to find market research, on and offline

Mogulisious hellos!

The Mogulettes and I recently visited the Science, Industry and Business Library, aka SIBL - ground zero for everything related to free enterprise. Unlike most public libraries I've seen, this one has a very modern and sleek design. Jackie Gold, one of their librarians (she's the one at the far left in the picture above), gave us a private tour. She started us off on the first floor, with its high ceilings and huge picture windows, where they have all the books that are allowed to be taken out, or for circulation, as they call it. It's also where you can get a library card, which is pretty important because with it you'll get remote access to a huge array of electronic resources. By entering the password in the back of the card into your computer at home, you'll be able to search the database of the NY Times, national and international magazines, the World Book Online, Women's American History plus many others. Nothing like letting your fingers do the walking!

SIBL has mostly science and business books but also technology and financial texts as well. They also have videos on everything from Doing Business in China to Franchising to Producing Your Own Special Interest Videos. One the right side of the main room there's a section with the most recent business periodicals and next to that you'll find dozens of computers which are hooked up to the internet, available at no charge - unfortunately the limit is 45 min. to an hour and you're only allowed on them once a day. Downstairs however, there's docking stations for your laptops with free web access and no time restrictions.

From there we climbed down the beautiful spiral staircase to the lower level, where they have the reference section, for books that cannot leave the library. Here you'll find all the nitty gritty details of the business topic of your choice. They have sample business plans, annual reports, SEC filings, government statistics, industry surveys - I get tired just looking at the list of resources! Thank God there's an information desk in the center of the room with librarians who will direct you to the best places to find whatever you're looking for...

Here's a few interesting links:
videos and podcasts
free classes & workshops
events for entrepreneurs
smallbiz.nypl.org - small business resources
CATNP - to search in the reference section
LEO - to search the catalog for all branch libraries

Both SCORE (the Service Corps of Retired Executives) and the NYC Business Solutions Center have offices here, with counselors available for appointments to help out entrepreneurs. Time flew by and soon it was 8pm and time for them to close down the shop. Now that I have a sense of how to navigate the labyrinths inside this information supercenter, I'll be able to gather topnotch market research for my business plan.

Knowledge is power people!

Anatomy of a Startup: Allongé Dance Center

We recently had two full-fledged entrepreneurs (as opposed to aspiring, as most of us are still…) come visit our ever expanding Mogulettes meeting (we now have 36 members!) to share how they got started. Olimpia Hernández and Luis Blanco launched the Allongé Dance Center almost two years ago. Here are a few highlights of their story.

Trained as a dancer since she was a child, Olimpia had been dreaming of opening a dance studio for a long time. She had actually tried to do it on her own in the past but it hadn’t worked out. Then she met Luis, who has a background in finances, and decided to ask him to be her partner. From a business perspective, they complemented each other quite well. Luis could focus on doing the numbers-crunching and researching their target market, while Olimpia's expertise as a dancer and instructor would help them formulate the curriculum for the school, and give them a competitive advantage.

Luis and Olimpia share their startup secrets














Once Luis agreed to come on board, they decided to set a start date - that way they had a deadline to work towards. They gave themselves 9 months to prepare and immediately started looking at possible locations for the school. Their target market was parents with enough disposable income to pay for their children to attend dance classes, so they went into the census website and searched for neighborhoods with annual household incomes of $80,000. After that, they checked to see if there were any cultural or religious components to the area that might make a dance school unpopular with its residents. Competition was also a consideration, so they looked for places that didn’t have a lot of other studios operating there. Forest Hills, Queens, was their eventual choice. They even found a space that had just been vacated and had previously housed a dance studio.

With a little help from your friends
Luis quickly sat down and made some projections of how much they would need to "set up shop". He calculated it would cost $20,000 to renovate and rent the space for the first three months of operations. That was a huge chunk of change, especially since they didn't have it! They would also be losing money when the space wasn't being used, which would probably be most of the time at the beginning. But what else could they do?

Olimpia was able to find help in an unlikely place: she asked none other than her old boss for advice, who came up with a much cheaper alternative. He owned a dance school in Westchester where she had been teaching classes, and since she planned to open a studio in another county, she knew he wouldn't feel threatened. He suggested they do what he did when he started out: find a space they could rent by the hour, and only pay for the amount of time they needed it. Brilliant! (Another reason why we need mentors: to avoid costly mistakes!)

Howdy partner!
So they switched gears and looked into health clubs, karate schools and other options, until they found a yoga studio nearby that fit their requirements: a hardwood floor and a few open slots of time in the afternoons. However, when they got down to negotiating the rent, the owners wanted too much. So Olimpia and Luis came up with the idea of partnering up with the "yogis". They offered to give them a percentage of their profits in exchange for paying less rent, and the deal was sealed. Another hurdle overcome!

Coming up next: How Allongé found low cost ways to advertise