Toolkit Home | Discovery & Identification | Learning from Legacy Businesses
Learning from legacy businesses.
Once you have a prioritized list of legacy businesses from community input, you can begin learning directly from those business owners. If you are limited in time or resources, this is the one research project you should focus on before creating a legacy business program. Reaching out to and learning from the owners of legacy businesses can help you understand what they need to survive in changing markets, what kind of support and assistance would be most beneficial to them, and also what policies or procedures might cause undue harm. Identifying and understanding the real-world problems, pressures, and issues that legacy businesses in your community face helps you build a program based on insight rather than opinion, providing targeted assistance and solutions to those problems.
Seeking the knowledge of these business owners early in the process lets them know that they are partners in the program. Involving them and seeking their expertise instills trust and buy-in in the program, and almost always guarantees follow-on participation. By engaging and learning from these business owners early in the process, the legacy business program becomes more relevant and impactful for the communities it is designed to serve.
Business owner interviews
Business owner interviews are one-on-one, usually semi-structured conversations with the targeted owners of your legacy business program. They provide an opportunity to gain a deeper understanding of the owners' stories, successes, challenges, and needs, enabling you to develop a program that effectively represents their priorities. Conducting these interviews before launching your legacy business program ensures that the outcome is grounded and built on real-world examples, rather than theoretical scenarios.
Business owner interviews can be done face-to-face, over the phone, or using a videoconferencing tool like Zoom. My personal preference is to use videoconferencing because most tools have recording and transcript features, ensuring that you capture the content accurately.
The best approach for this type of interview is to conduct semi-structured interviews that create an outline for the conversation, allowing the participant to lead the discussion. Since you are speaking with the people who know their business best, frame the conversation and then let them take it from there. Your questions should be open-ended to allow the expert to expand on the conversation, but they should be roughly the same questions for each participant so that you can analyze the data you collect. It also helps to share your questions or an outline with the expert before the interview.
Photo by Cindy Kane Photography
Photo by Cindy Kane Photography
Resource.
Community Tool Box
Community Tool Box has a valuable online resource for planning semi-structured interviews with subject matter experts and others.
Langston Boulevard Alliance | Arlington Virginia
For the People & Places project with the Langston Boulevard Alliance in Arlington, VA, our team’s first step in promoting local legacy businesses and identifying the issues and problems they face was to conduct in-person, semi-structured interviews. To date, we have conducted over 25 interviews and created more than 200 promotional video clips for the project.
Case in point.
Business owner surveys
Business owner surveys are online, paper-based, or in-person methods of research that allow community business owners to set the priorities for your legacy business program. They are one of the easiest ways for you to collect a large sample of information on how your legacy business program can best serve business owners.
Surveys offer a variety of options for collecting data, including ranking options, open-ended questions, emotional response or sentiment questions, and multiple-choice questions. Keep in mind that the quality of your data is only as good as the quality of your survey; therefore, take the time to understand how to design the study for optimal results.
The business owner survey is one of the best ways to gather a comprehensive view from all your targeted legacy businesses on their needs from your program. They allow you to ask questions about the challenges the business is currently facing, what they are worried about, their business needs, as well as demographics and technical or business skill levels. They also allow you to gather insight or ideas for what support they would like to see through your legacy business program. As you are tracking the survey responses, be sure and cross reference how and in what format your municipal government collects or tracks small business information (e.g., demographics) to allow for easier collaboration and sharing of the data. The quick gathering and analysis of surveys make them an efficient tool for effectively defining your legacy business program.
Online Survey Tools
SurveyMonkey is one of the most commonly used online survey tools, and it also offers resources for effective survey design. Google Forms and Typeform also offer solid free survey tools.
Tool tip.
Resource.
Penn State Survey Design
Penn State offers a valuable online resource on survey design to help you achieve your goals.
City of Chula Vista Business Survey | Chula Vista, California
The City of Chula Vista, California, created a small business survey that asks about the challenges business owners face (along with other questions, including demographics). The survey takes under 10 minutes to complete and offers Google translation for ease of use and accessibility.
Case in point.
Business owner workshops
Business owner workshops are similar to community workshops, but they tend to be more focused and have fewer participants. These workshops are structured activities where local business owners can share their expertise, discuss solutions that might best help them in a legacy business program, and establish priorities for what they need most. Exercises center around problem-solving, creativity, brainstorming, and prioritization. They are one of the most immersive ways for you and your team to gain a deeper understanding of the realities of business ownership in your target community.
These workshops are crucial to have early in your process because they ensure that your program is based on real solutions and actual priorities from business owners, that can be compared, contrasted, and evaluated against priorities set by outside experts or municipal partners. They allow you to hear directly about issues, such as rising rents, changing markets, or succession planning, that can help establish the processes, services, and policies that will create an effective legacy business program. They also allow business owners to prioritize their issues, ensuring that your program starts where the business owners need it most.
Analyze, document, and share
Whether you conduct interviews, workshops, or surveys, it is essential to thoroughly analyze and interpret the results to gain a deeper understanding of your legacy business program. Many of the online survey tools offer analysis tools to simplify the process. With workshops, you can do analysis exercises or discussions with your participants to get real-time interpretations of their responses. Interviews can be trickier because, while the questions may be structured, responses may vary widely and lack consistency. When this is the case, it is a good idea to search for patterns and themes in the responses that can help you understand their meaning. In many cases, research can lead to more questions, so be sure to follow up with your participants when the need arises.
Once you have completed your analysis, be sure to share the results with the participants and your stakeholders. Sharing information with participants helps build trust through a transparent process and mitigates issues of opinion or bias by presenting data from a large sample of people. This same data is a valuable tool when sharing it with your stakeholders, as it prevents them from thinking that program decisions are being made based on opinion or intuition.
Dot Voting Prioritization Exercise
Dot Voting is a quick exercise for prioritizing or ranking a large group of ideas or solutions. Once your team and business owners have established a list of processes, services, and/or policies for a legacy business program, this exercise helps you understand which ones are most valuable to the business owners. The exercise is conducted by placing all solutions on tables or displaying them on whiteboards. To ensure fairness, each participant is then given the same number of dots (stickers) that they can place on the solutions that they value most. Different-colored dots can be distributed according to various voting parameters, such as urgency or long-term value. The Interaction Design Foundation provides a concise one-page summary on how to conduct dot voting.
Tool tip.
Resource.
SessionLab
The SessionLab Library of Facilitating Techniques (requires sign-up for a free trial) gives you access to hundreds of facilitation tools and allows you to sort them by topic or theme.
Affinity Diagrams
Affinity diagrams are a good tool for examining divergent answers and complex data that comes from interviews and helping to identify patterns and themes.