When counselors with the Small Business Development Center Network need help, they can turn to a group of tech-savvy researchers working in offices at the University of Texas at San Antonio Downtown campus.

These researchers can produce customized reports, market analysis, patent searches and demographic charts and maps to aid counselors across the nation as they work with small businesses trying to start up or expand. And it is all free - at least for the various counselors who work for the Small Business Development Center (SBDC) Network. The service is funded directly through the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA).

Deborah Schueneman,
director of SBCDNet,
oversees a team that
provides research
services for Small
Business Development
Center counselors
across the nation. The SBDC Network is also funded by the SBA in partnership with universities across the country, which host the centers. SBDC Network counselors work directly with the small business community and are the primary clients of SBDCNet.

While SBDCNet is available to help any U.S. small business, the service is not available to the public directly. All requests for information or research must come through an SBDC counselor.

The national research service, known as the SBDCNet National Information Clearinghouse, has been operating in offices provided by UTSA since 1998.

Deborah Schueneman has served as director of SBDCNet since 2005 and manages a team of 17 to 23 people, including a number of part-time student interns. The program has a $300,000 annual budget from the SBA and also receives some funding support from UTSA.

"Our objective is to serve as the research arm for SBDC nationwide," Schueneman says. "We get about 5,000 research requests per year."

Research tools

Schueneman says her staff regularly produces maps using geographic information system, or GIS, technology to plot where a business' competitors, vendors or suppliers are located within a one-mile, two-mile or five-mile radius. They have access to databases that contain reams of information useful to small-business owners looking to open a new store or relocate to a new area.

And the work that SBDCNet does saves on average about seven hours of work by the SBDC counselor who works directly with the small business.

"Last year we calculated the impact of our program and the return on investment (ROI) the government is getting for its $300,000," Schueneman says. "For fiscal 2008, we saved them $156 per request for a total of $733,353, which comes out to a 244 percent ROI."

David Baenziger, a counselor with SBDC in San Antonio, says he probably uses SBDCNet services between two to four times a month.

"They do excellent work and can find things the average person doesn't know about," he says. "On more than one occasion, they have brought back options that I was not aware of."

The turnaround time is excellent too, Baenziger adds. Sometimes the lending agencies are waiting on these research reports before approving loans, so it is crucial to get them back in a timely fashion. Banks especially like this service because the lenders consider it to be unbiased, he says.

Happy clients

Around the nation, SBDCNet gets good reviews from its counselor clients. Tom Lowles, an SBDC counselor in Portland, Ore., says his client was greatly impressed.

"In fact, he was flabbergasted by the quality of the research and stated it was much better than he receives from other sources," Lowles says.

Cecilia Schlicher, an SBDC counselor at Sam Houston State University in Huntsville, Texas, says SBDCNet has access to databases that would cost her individual center too much.

"These databases and access to books and articles are very valuable to my clients," she says.

The number of requests for research from SBDC counselors has steadily grown over the years, nearly doubling since 2005, Schueneman says, but topped out at about 5,000 in 2008.