SBDCNet is the official National Information Clearinghouse of the U.S. Small Business Administration. SBDCNet is funded in part by a Cooperative Agreement with the U.S. Small Business Administration. We also receive funding and support from our local sponsoring institution, The University of Texas at San Antonio, where we are hosted by the South-West Texas Border Small Business Development Center Network. Additionally, we are members of America’s SBDC, the association that represents the nationwide network of small business development centers.

Mission

Our mission is to support the business research and information needs of the nation’s network of 1,000+ Small Business Development Centers (the “SBDC Network”) and their small business clients. We fulfill our mission by:

• providing business research assistance directly to official SBDC  Business Advisors
• maintaining this public-access website.

Services

SBDCNet provides small business research services to the entire 1,000+ member SBDC Network of Small Business Development Centers located in all 50 states, Guam and Puerto Rico. In partnership with your SBDC, we can produce a broad range of financial, market and demographic research reports customized to your client’s industry and geographic location. In addition to supporting small business entrepreneurs, SBDCNet now offers an array of products and services to support small to mid-size community development.

Results

We measure our success across several metrics.

1. Completed Research Requests. We track the number of research requests we complete during a fiscal year. To date, we have completed over 88,000 research requests customized to the needs of small businesses.
2. SBDC Network Productivity. SBDC business advisors tell us that we saved them over 25,000 work hours during FY2017, which freed them up to serve the equivalent of an additional 5,500 long-term SBDC clients. Here is how we calculate this increase in advisor productivity:
   • Based on survey data, SBDC advisors tell us that each SBDCNet research request saves an average of 5.5 counselor work hours.  We multiply these 5.5 hours saved per request by the current period’s total completed research requests to yield a Total Number of Saved Counselor Work Hours. The Total Number of Saved Counselor Work Hours is then divided by 5 hours (the national average for counseling hours devoted to serving a long-term SBDC client), to yield the More SBDC Clients Served estimate. Long-term SBDC clients are found to be the most likely to complete the SBDC counseling process and produce the desirable program outcomes of job creation and increases in business activity.
3. Website Visitors. We use Google Analytics to analyze traffic to our websites: both our public access website and our intranet site which SBDC advisors use to order research on behalf of their small business clients. Analysis of this traffic shows we also have visitors from dozens of countries seeking information on entrepreneurship.