Economic Gardening: Using Information to Help Your Entrepreneurs Grow (cont.)

In addition to database capabilities, the city of Littleton has GIS expertise that enables it to plot the locations of a business’s existing customers and map a color-shaded density pattern. Click for a larger picture.

But it is the information component of the program where we have developed high levels of competence that have intrigued much of the country. In the late 1980s, we discovered database services and the powerful world they unlocked. Long before the arrival of the Internet, we were developing database-searching skills to find new markets for highgrowth Littleton companies, to conduct competitor intelligence on their behalf and to produce insightful industry trend reports.

While the Internet continues to explode in its uses, it is still inferior to database searching when looking for business information.Whereas a typical search term on the Internet might produce millions of hits, that flood of undifferentiated information is of little use to someone looking for a specific answer to a specific question. Database searching, while expensive, drills deep in a specific area and provides a high level of actionable information.

We subscribe to a number of services that provide wide ranges of business information, including general business portals such as Lexis-Nexis, Dialog and Dun & Bradstreet, as well as lesser known companies such as Plunkett (for industry stats), SkyMinder (for information on companies in nearly every country in the world) and SRDS Direct Marketing (which provides direct marketing lists for everything from people with psoriasis to people who shop at Neiman Marcus). Each service has a number of databases and each database has a number of publications and even more articles.We are able to sort through literally hundreds of thousands of highly related articles to find welldocumented answers for our customers.

Most businesses want targeted mailing lists, which we are able to provide quickly. Need a B-to-B (business-tobusiness) list of all medical instrument companies west of the Mississippi with 20 or more employees, sales of at least $20 million and a growth rate exceeding 10 percent? We can provide that within the hour, often with the CEO name, address and phone number.Want a B-to-C (business-to-consumer) list of everyone who makes over $100,000, belongs to a PTA, drives an SUV and reads Martha Stewart Living? You’d be talking about the lifestyle known as “Turbo Boomers,” and we know they are found only in select neighborhoods in nine major American cities.

For a company that sells church furniture and supplies nationwide, we developed a competitor intelligence report that identified 15 major competitors, noted their sales levels, number of employees, business strategy, financial stress rating and their D&B Paydex rating (how late they paid bills). We analyzed competitor Web presence, their page rank on Google and how long they had been in business.We identified key opportunities and threats for each competitor, such as companies that were struggling due to big box competition, mission statements that focus on social values, slowloading Web sites and whether they were associated with a major church denomination.

Another example of information assistance is the industry trend report we prepared for a biometrics company. (The biometrics industry identifies fingerprints, iris scans, walking gaits, facial features and other biological markers that make positive identification for security purposes.) Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, this industry has exploded – but as we found out, it was also fairly disorganized. Common standards don’t exist, and office buildings were having so much trouble with fingerprint readers they had to abandon the system. Still, the U.S. government intends to collect biometric data for every visitor who enters the country, and this alone will create a huge industry.

In addition to database searching, we have GIS expertise that enables us to plot the locations of existing customers and turn that map into a color-shaded density pattern. At the retail level, we can plot competitor locations and draw trade area circles to see where overlaps and gaps exist. For many local businesses, we can create expenditure patterns for several hundred consumer products, ranging from computers to clothes to cars.We can tell you how much ketchup is bought in the neighborhood next to you, should you want to know.

More recently, we have developed expertise in search engine marketing, which increases the visibility of a Web site in the results pages of search engines such as Google and Yahoo.We have tools to determine the number of people using a specific search term and the number of sites that have that term.We can analyze Web sites to determine if they are optimized for search engines. If you have “frames” or “flash” on your home page, for example, you are invisible to the search engines – no matter how much you paid for the site’s development.

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