What small businesses are in Delaware? There will soon be a document for that

Bob Older doesn't think Delaware is friendly when it comes to small business.

Despite surveys saying otherwise, he has heard stories about the hardships of starting a new business, navigating the different and difficult regulations up and down the state and entrepreneurs not really knowing where a new business could be most successful. 

The president and founder of the Delaware Small Business Chamber decided to do something about it.

In conjunction with Delaware's Small Business Development Center, Older wants to help entrepreneurs and those thinking about starting a small business here by providing a comprehensive, "first-of-its-kind" market analysis for the entire state that will give them what they need to make informed decisions.

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Older said the document will offer readers a broad view of the small business landscape in Delaware by focusing on key areas of each county. It will give readers required demographics and will offer a glimpse at what possible competition or resources that are available in certain areas and throughout the state.

The project, which Older says is 60 percent complete, will focus on Delaware's Main Streets and downtown areas to help fill the vacant spaces that seem to dot many Delaware communities.

"The idea is to create a market analysis for the entire state," Older said. "We are not trying to reinvent the wheel. We are trying to use the resources that are around to give our members and the small business people a lot of different resources. We want to generate all of this information and put it all together. There is a need in Delaware."

Older said the document will be broken down into areas, so prospective small business owners know what restaurants, hotels and retail, among other demographics, are in each area.

"It will be a resource that tells these potential small business owners what exists in the area they choose, who they need to talk to and what they need to get started," he said.

The DSBC – the only chamber in Delaware that is statewide and focused on small business – is currently pulling together all new demographics and data with the help of the University of Delaware for Middletown, Townsend, Smyrna, Clayton and Georgetown.

Once that is completed, the focus will be on Wilmington, Newark and Dover – those communities that have already completed their own individual market analyses. That, in turn, will be compiled into the document.

Other communities in all three Delaware counties will then be added.

Older said the next step will be to send several thousand surveys to business owners throughout the state with specific questions built around the small businessperson and the challenges they face in opening a business.

"We hope It will become a requisite resource for small business owners, their banks and their real estate brokers to use to offer a lot of demographic and business owner survey results on many major topics and issues facing Delaware businesses," he said.

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Middletown Area Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Roxanne Ferguson thinks the analysis is long overdue and believes it can help fill the handful of vacant storefronts in downtown Middletown.

She said a good start to that goal has been the Middletown Incubator and Collaborative Workspace, which has 22 businesses operating out of the space and will move in March to accommodate its rapid growth. 

Ferguson said as many as seven businesses that started with the incubator and shared workspace have moved on to open in their own space.

While none have moved into downtown Middletown, she says that will be the focus moving forward with the help of the market analysis.

Older said that he and Ferguson share the same philosophy when it comes to small business and that the natural progression from incubator to downtown storefronts is a good example of what he'd like to see throughout the state.

"If you take a look at what the Middletown Chamber has accomplished in Roxanne’s tenure, it is tremendous growth," Older said. "The incubator here in Middletown has been a huge success and I think the market analysis is going to be huge for the state of Delaware." 

Other efforts to fill the vacant spaces in dwindling downtowns have been launched and have had limited success.

One such effort was Project Pop-Up that started in 2012 and lasted only a couple of years. Select Delaware entrepreneurs were given the opportunity to be "open for business" in one of the state's downtowns by offering commercial space rent-free for three months. From there, the businesses were on their own.

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First & Little Boutique in Middletown was one of the first pop-up businesses and saw immediate success. While owner Amber Shader said her business didn't benefit from the incubator, it did receive "valuable" backing from the Middletown Chamber.

"I wouldn't have been successful without the help of the chamber," she said. "They were very instrumental in my success through marketing and advertising efforts and just being an advocate for small business."

In September, First & Little Boutique held a grand re-opening to celebrate expansion from one Main Street location to another in downtown Middletown. Shader said none of it would have been possible without people in Middletown caring about small business.

"I got to dip my toe in the water and see if I would be successful in a downtown Main Street setting," she said of Project Pop-Up. "We're going strong now. You don't get that in a strip mall setting."

Another effort in Middletown comes from town officials applying to receive Downtown Development District status.

Middletown officials plan to use a $49,995 Neighborhood Building Blocks grant and an additional $500 from the town to fund the creation of a Downtown Development District plan.

Downtown Development Districts are fairly new to the state of Delaware, with eight districts designated to date. In 2014, the Downtown Development Districts Act, passed by the Delaware General Assembly, was created to use a relatively small amount of public funding to attract investments from private developers in central corridors blighted by vacant buildings and economic stagnation.

With all three forces at play in Middletown, Older and Ferguson believe the downtown area there and in other Delaware communities will soon see a resurgence of small businesses filling some of the long-vacant storefronts.

Older said the market analysis is a project that should make a big difference in Delaware because people don’t know the information for the different towns. He said it will be beneficial to have it all together.

"What we are going to do in conjunction with this market analysis is to help fill up empty spaces on Main Streets throughout the state," Older said. "The state says we are small business friendly and we’re not. I’d like to see these projects like Middletown is doing to get small businesses in and help them and cut out the red tape. "

Reach Jerry Smith at jsmith17@delawareonline.com. follow him on Twitter at @JerrySmithTNJ.