National Small Business Week is celebrated in the United States the first week of May each year. The SWLA Economic Development Alliance is joining in support of small businesses by promoting a new, online program to help small businesses called SizeUp!  

The service is available for free to all local businesses www.allianceswla.org/SizeUp. SizeUp delivers powerful market research and business intelligence so Southwest Louisiana businesses can make data driven decisions using analysis that has historically only been available to big corporations.  

In today’s information economy, businesses without access to information are at a higher risk of failure and stunted growth. The SWLA Economic Development Alliance is committed to helping local small businesses successfully startup and grow through the support of programs and services like SizeUp.  

Small businesses are essential to economic health: 

• 99.9% of all businesses are small businesses. 
• Small businesses create 425% more net new jobs than big businesses. 
• Locally owned businesses contribute more to the economy through the “economic multiplier” of increased respending of dollars in the local economy. 
• Half of the national gross domestic product comes from small business. 
• New businesses are currently starting at the fastest rate in the last 15 years. 

“We want all of our small businesses and aspiring entrepreneurs to be able to make informed, data-driven decisions so that they can be more successful and reduce the risk of any new business failures,” said George Swift, President/CEO of the SWLA Economic Development Alliance 

SizeUp helps local businesses by providing them industry data analysis that empowers them to: 

• Rank their industry performance across multiple measurements. 
• Discover potential new customers and suppliers. 
• Target advertising and marketing to ideal customers. 
• Analyze the demographics of nearby customers and prospective employees. 

Aspiring entrepreneurs can use the data to test, verify, or reject assumptions that will enable them to develop a better business plan for opening their company and to reduce the risk of failure by better preparing them with quality information.  

The software powering the SizeUp won the 1st Place award from the United States Department of Commerce for a business app that helps American businesses be more competitive, improve their success, foster prosperity, and create more jobs. 

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