Business Research & SPL --- Mark Pond

 

 

Calendar:  

 

 

 

 

            Bill Simer was happy for a good skiing day at 49 Degrees North

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            Ron Noble was happy for a visit at EWU with grandchildren

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            Laura Zahn was $5 worth of happy for a visit with Bozeman relatives and for a lucrative event raising money for the Ronald McDonald House. 

                 

           

            If you want to start a business in the Spokane area, one of the best resource bases to start is the Central Library.

 

            At the April 10 luncheon, Mark Pond, business research librarian, showed the wide array of data available in the business center to check out the competition and choose the locations that might make the profit or losses for a start-up, or for any business. Mark was part of the Central Library tour when club members visited on March 6.  He joined us this week to show a “deep dive” into what data are available.  And as he scrolled internet pages of various categories, this data dive is about as deep as the ocean floor.

 

            Mark, born in Kettle Falls, said he grew up and worked in a logging family, but to avoid “the broken bones” of that industry, he “wanted to start in something with an ‘l,’ but not logging.”  The new library was a good choice, for him and for the library.

 

            Resource bases at the library, and available on remote links, rival data through North Carolina and Stanford in one segment and libraries only in New York City and Boston in another.

 

            The library uses data from the authoritative IBIS Word and from Bloomberg, plus census reports from various sources.

 

            Mark prefers consultations one-on-one and in person.  He said non-profit organizations can schedule times on Tuesdays and Friday mornings.

 

            With the Central Library business programs, much of the Greater Spokane Inc. initiatives have moved to the library, he said.

 

            Demographics can be sorted by city, county, state and nationally and placed in, for example, 1, 3 or 5-mile areas.

 

            “We can slice and dice the lists,” he said.

 

            He said the resources are built on census data, magazine lists, loyalty card lists and other sources.   “That’s how the sausage gets made,” Mark said. Any time someone swipes a bank card, data is stored, he added.

 

            Pitch Book resources are a valuable tool for crowd source access, he said.

 

            Among his examples: If you want to start a training program for older women, the data can be tailored to the nearest cluster of sophisticated users in that neighborhood.

 

            Or, if you want to find a good strawberry field to pick, you can send out your drones and your robots, and save some of the back-breaking work.

 

            All you need is the idea – and your library card.

 

            Bulletin editors: Chuck Rehberg and Sandy Fink