Tools useful to businesses

Posted by Lake Superior Community Partnership on April 13, 2015

Here at the LSCP, we provide programs and tools that benefit our partners and the business community.  We welcome businesses of all stages and sizes, partner or not, to stop in and visit with our business development team and let us show you what an asset we can be to your company.  Services include business planning, financial planning, market research, marketing, advocacy, business to business opportunities and much more. Face to face support isn’t always required, note that we also have helpful tools that can be accessed from your computer.

ZoomProspector is a site location database available for anyone to use. You can locate Zoom from the home page of our website (www.marquette.org) or under Site Selection or Business Resources. This program provides comprehensive information to help new, expanding and relocating businesses find the perfect location. You are able to search for buildings, sites and businesses that are for lease or sale. The program filters by square feet, price, zip code and any keywords that you’d like. You can choose assets you are interested in such as redevelopment ready communities, enterprise zones, foreign trade zones, rail access, build to suit and more.

Zoom is updated frequently and connected to the multiple listing service. If you have a site, property or office space that you would like to see listed, contact us and we’ll include details and photos on this site.

Zoom always provides reporting on each property including labor force, demographics, consumer spending, wages, business types nearby and housing nearby. These reports can be exported into PDFs and the information is useful when searching for a property for your business.

Another helpful tool is SizeUp, this software is designed to show businesses how they can grow and stay competitive. All information is customized to our geographic region and updated quarterly or semi-annually. Here are just some of the features SizeUp offers:

• Benchmark Performance – See how you “size up” by comparing your business’ performance to other competitors in your industry. SizeUp super-crunches millions of data points to answer this question so businesses know where they stand.
• Demographic Analysis – Interactively map up-to-date demographic, labor force, and consumer expenditure data for your area, based on hundreds of variables.
• Assess Competitiveness – Map where your potential competitors, customers, and suppliers are located. Determine how you can best serve existing customers, new customers, and choose suppliers.
• Find Best Places to Advertise – Determine the optimal areas to target your next advertising campaign based on industry performance and target markets.
• Exportable Reports – Save and share demographic, consumer expenditure, and workforce reports.
• User-friendly and Intuitive Interface – No training required! SizeUp is easy to navigate and use, so business owners can quickly find the information they seek.
• Caches User Information – No need to re-enter the same information on each website visit – SizeUp can access information previously entered on the same computer.

Business owners can find out how their performance compares to competitors in their industry based on benchmarking of their revenue, employees, and years in business, and other measures. An entrepreneur that has yet to start a business can use this tool to assess whether their projections are realistic given the state of the competitive market.

SizeUp is only available to LSCP partners. If you are a partner and need your log in or training on this robust tool, please give our office a call. If you are not a partner, we can help you take care of that today!  Simply call Betsy at 906.226.6591 to begin taking advantage of the benefits the LSCP has to offer.

Both of these tools are available on our website, www.marquette.org. We think these, along with our business development team, will be helpful to you in starting, maintaining or growing your business!

Amy Clickner, CEO, writes a bi-weekly column for the Mining Journal.