Starting a business from scratch is not for everyone, finding a location, marketing, and building a brand can be daunting tasks for new businesses.  What is the alternative if you still want to be a business owner but don't want to start from the ground up?  Have you considered a franchise? Some of the benefits of franchises are established brand and name recognition and centralized marketing/ advertising support.  If this is something that you might be interested in learning more about, FranNet can help. FranNet provides free consulting and can help you decide whether you are a good match for a franchise.

The Santa Teresa Branch Library is hosting the New and Small Business Workshop series.  Topics range from “Blogging for Your Business and SEO for Your  Website” presented by Cheryl and Sam Ellemberg of ABD Productions to Lynnea Hagen of the Abundance Company speaking on Business Plans. 

These free workshops give local entrepreneurs a chance to network with each other and give valuable advice.  Blogging, for example, is a chance for businesses to advertise products, sales, or post testimonials from customers in addition to having the chance to communicate with the public.  Blogging workshops include advice for bringing repeat traffic to the business website, blog website design, and tips for creating new content on a regular basis.  

We meet every 2nd Saturday of the Month from 10:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. in the Santa Teresa Branch Community Room.  No registration required.  For more information on this workshop series and past topics shared check out our Facebook and click on the Events link, Past Events.  Looking forward to networking with you.

Statista as the name alludes features statistics, interesting and useful statistics, especially for investors and entrepreneurs. Statista is actually a subscription product but you can still access a lot of content for free. A few examples of what kind of interesting statistics you can find on the website:

• Number of daily activations of Android devices
• Unique number of Pinterest visitors and average time the user spends on the site per month
• Market share of web browsers on different continents

Their statistics are not just tech oriented, the site covers statistics across many different industries.

Perhaps, the Yelp chart pictured might have helped in your decision to purchase stock?

http://www.statista.com/chartoftheday/media/

Are you in the midst of preparing your personal income taxes and feeling completely overwhelmed at the thought of handling your business taxes? Don't worry we have an event that can help.  Small Business Tax Assistance Day sponsored by Business Owner Space will be held on Wednesday, March 7, from 3-8 pm at the Scottish Rite Center.  Folks from the IRS will be available to help you with your business tax return questions from 3-7 pm.  Also, there will be workshops on S-corporations, Sole Proprietorship & Recordkeeping, Sales & Use Tax, and Payroll Taxes. This event is free but please register. The library will be hosting a table, see you there!

You might be thinking that you are barely getting by paying your monthly bills and have no way to save for retirement.  The fact is that you cannot put off preparing for retirement any longer, the more time you have to put money aside, the more comfortable you will be in your retirement. If you have no idea how to get started in preparing for retirement, good news, Financial Planning Association Pro Bono is visiting the King Library on Wednesday, February 29 @ 6:30pm to help you.

Hopefully, you have used Reference USA in the past and it has been useful in locating target business information and business contacts. Now, there is a new component to Reference USA, a consumer/ lifestyles search. You can find consumer contact information based on lifestyle interests such as cooking, apparel, pets and more.  This would be a great way to make direct mail contact lists and target potential customers in your area. In addition to limiting by area and zip codes, you can also search by census data on income and home value.  This is really a nice, new powerful addition to Reference USA and I hope it is useful for all you business owners out there.