Interview on Friday, more next week

The questionnaire is complete and includes sections on the entrepreneur, the business, industry, competition, marketing, and some interesting questions on why they think their business remains successful. An interesting comment from one of the business owners --- "successful business" is probably taking on a new meaning these days --- Survival! Interesting comment. I'm wondering how the entrepreneurs will respond to the question.

First interview tomorrow morning. Got the questions ready. Picked up a voice recorder to capture important points that I might miss as I'm taking notes and engaging the respondent in the conversation. 6 or 7 more interviews lined up for next week!! I'm trying to not over-kill with this project. I'm finding that setting parameters and establishing some boundaries is going to be essential. Because of my enthusiasm for learning more about what's going in the area with entrepreneurs, I tend to overcommit and am turning this into a year long study.... Speaking of overkill, I came across a couple of books that are so timely for this project. One is by Jim Collins, the guy who wrote Good to Great. He did an other study on businesses who failed. The title is "How The Mighty Fall And Why Some Companies Never Give In." The other is "Billion Dollar Lessons by Carroll and Mui." Both focus on the subject of this study - business success contrasted with business failure. Why do some fail (or Fall as Collins says) and others succeed. Hopefully I'll gain a fresh perspective at the end of the project.

5 New Appointments

Great response from small business folks! I lined up 5 interviews so far starting this Friday. Many of the small business owners seem eager to help and are excited in sharing their stories. The survey instrument is almost ready- I'm reorganizing it to maximize the information gathered in a short time frame.

Appointments made and research moving along

Amazing how much information is available on the companies I'm planning to interview. I have a several excellent leads from the Gilbert folks. I have an interview with a couple of the most prominent and successful entrepreneurs in Arizona and am really looking forward to hear what they have to say about what it takes to remain successful. For the businesses on the Chandler side, the main task at this point if making appointments and gathering basic information prior to the interviews. Entrepreneurship is alive and well in the SE Valley!

The list of businesses to interview is growing

Worked from home quite a bit today. In addition to the 25 Chandler business names from last week, I'm also picking up a nice list from businesses from my contacts in Gilbert and surrounding areas. I'm hoping to line up my first interview this week and will call the business owner tomorrow. Prior to the interview, I'm doing some home work... nothing worse than showing up to interview a business person and asking questions to which answers are all over their company website. This particular company has a great deal of information on their website about projects, technologies they've created, awards and recognitions, etc. The CEO is also widely known and has had a great deal of press on his achievements as well.

Once I go through the materials and continue tweaking my survey instrument, I'll be ready to begin the study. I'm also working on the research methodology and have decided to use a simple quantitative and qualitative approach for this study. The quantitative portion will focus on items such as industry, basic demographic data, number of employees, approximate revenues, etc. The qualitative portion will be in-depth interviews that I'll conduct with the CEO or company founder.