Free and cheap resources for home-based businesses - directory of available government publications and services

Home Office Computing, March, 1992

MONEY

How to Price Your Product

SBA Publications, P.O. Box 30, Denver, CO 80201-0030; (202) 205-6743.

The SBA publication, Pricing Your Products and Services Profitably (FM13), includes various pricing techniques and when to use them. Price: $1.

How to Raise Money

Office of Business Development & Marketing, U.S. Small Business Administration, 409 3rd St. SW, Washington, DC 20416; (202) 205-6665.

How to Raise Money for a Small Business is a free fact sheet that outlines the basics of raising money: where to find it, types of business loans, how to write a loan proposal, and SBA financial programs.

Money to Work on Your Invention

Office of Innovation, Research and Technology, U.S. Small Business Administration, DC 20416; (202) 205-7777. Or Energy-Related Inventions Program, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Bldg. 411, Room A115, Gaithersburg, MD 20899; (301) 975-5500.

Each year 11 government departments and agencies offer more than $475 million in grant money to small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to work on new ideas under the Small Business Innovation Research program. Recently, a consultant working at home received $500,000 to develop a new product for children. A man in Virginia received $50,000 to work on a new dental cream in his basement.

There are three phases to the programs for those ideas that are accepted. Phase I is usually funded for six months with awards up to $50,000. This phase is used to investigate the feasibility of th eresearcher's idea. Phase II offers funding up to $500,000 and is offered if the feasibility phase is successful. Phase III is used for the pursuit of private funding from venture capitalists or other third parties in order to commercialize the product. Contact the SBA office listed above for further information.

BUSINESS COUNSELING

Find Your Customers

Contact your state Office of Economic Development to locate a Small Business Development Center near you. Or call your local U.S. Government Federal Information Center (listed in the phone book) or the main Federal Information Center, (301) 722-9000.

You can use the same source big corporations use to decide the best place to, say, market a home-improvement business, or to get a mailing list of all the women in your neighborhood who are over 5' 8" in order to sell them a new product.

There are three places to go for this marketing information. The best place to get free or very-low-cost marketing-consulting help is your local Small Business Development Center.

State governments offer a wide variety of market information, too. The Department of Motor Vehicles sells information from drivers' licenses and motor-vehicle registrations. You can also get listings of doctors, lawyers, real estate agents, and even delicatessens from state licensing and regulatory offices. Or your state's Census Data Center can identify those zip codes most likely to have young children whose parents can afford orthodontia for them.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture can give you marketing information for thousands of products, from house plants to bull sperm. The U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Administration provide marketing information, too. Your local Federal Information Center can help you locate the specific office that can help you.

Free Government Experts on Any

Topic

Call your local U.S. Government Federal Information Center listed in the phone book. Or call the main Federal Information Center at (301) 722-9000.

There are approximately 700,000 experts in the federal government, all spending their careers studying some aspect of business that entrepreneurs can tap into. If you are looking for expertise on how to sell a new T-shirt idea, you can call the underwear expert at the U.S. International Trade Commission. This and other expert knowledge is available to you for the price of a telephone call.

Free Consultants

Service Corps of Retired Executives (SCORE): Contact your local SBA Hotline, (800) 827-5722 or the main SCORE office, (202) 205-6762.

SCORE members work with local SBA offices to provide small-business owners with free advice on all kinds of topics.

Cheapeast Way to Send Out Mail

Marketing Dept., Regular Mail Services Division, U.S. Postal Service, 475 L'Enfant Plaza SW, Washington, DC 20260-6336; (202) 268-6965.

When you do business through the mail, you need to keep up on rate and classification changes when they occur. The U.S. Postal Service puts out Memo to Mailers, a free monthly publication to keep you posted on these changes and other relevant postal news. To be put on the mailing list, write to the above address. For more information about the Memo, contact Communications Dept., U.S. Postal Service, Room 2P420, 475 L'Enfant Plaza SW, Washington, DC 20260; (202) 268-6874.

The Marketing Department of the Postal Service has put together the free booklet A Guide to Business Mail Preparation. This booklet gives you information on addressing for automation, postnet bar codes, and FIM patterns.