Lifelong learning for small business owners

For our very first episode of the show, we prepared a case study guide. We began back in 1994 for the PBS Adult Learning Service special broadcast of the show to every college and university throughout the USA. By 1996 we were working with hundreds of business school professors around the country to use these case studies guides within their classrooms. Students were assigned cases to read online. Today there are well over 1000 questions and answers about starting, running and growing a business, and the number grows every day.

Helping business students has its own rewards but our goal has always been to help our fellow small business owners. Our goal, even in 1996, was to set up an interactive mechanism online so by answering the same questions asked of each small business owner in an episode of the show, our small business owners and viewers could develop a case study guide right here within this website.

Such a case study guide could help a small business grow. Every successful business owner we've interviewed has had some kind of projections. They've had a plan. They have long-term and short term goals. A case study guide examines and justifies those goals. It'll take your first principles (some of ours), your past (your transcript), then actively projecting all of them together into the future. By answering these questions, you'll be asked to articulate the evergreen truths about your business. You'll be challenged to see how your business is a good business.

These kinds of case study guides should be used in schools all over the USA and around the world.

And increasingly, they are. First, Prentice Hall asked to insert some of these case study guides as chapter endings in their best-selling business textbooks. Hundreds of thousands of those books have been sold to colleges and universities around the world.

Since 2001, Thomson Learning adopted Small Business School and has included the case study guides and video clips for their best-selling business textbooks. Today, thousands of business schools and management classes around the world, a few high schools, and one elementary school (Holmes Beach, Florida) have used these case studies in their classroom.

You do not have to be left out. You can return to school without leaving your desk.

We have brought all these study guides on line within this community. Virtually every aspect of starting, running and growing your own business is addressed. Take one step at a time. You have choices. You can work through the FREE section of the site within our Eight Steps (above) – four to start and four to grow a business.

The streaming media centers at five universities today (we expect to expand that to 50 within a few years) is based on streaming video of each episode, the transcripts and our interactive study guides.

The weekly show and this website, SmallBusinessSchool.org, is the foundation of the Small Business Index of Learning Companies.

Complete a few classes at SmallBusinessSchool.org and you will find that with every answer you have given, you can selectively use parts of each to generate your own profile page, study guide, and transcript automatically. Then, you open the options to display those pages back under your state, your type of business, your business name, and your name.

Later you can opt to generate a business plan, use it to raise debt capital, or even generate a SCOR document to raise equity capital.

Thanks.

For more: Vision and Open letter, and then for even more,
Dynamic Pages, profiles and Index