Center For Small Business

College of Business Administration | Sacramento State

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Services

Services

The CSB offers free technical consulting services to small for-profit and not-for-profit organizations. These services are provided in virtually all areas of business other than taxation, law, and loan packaging.

The CSB distributes the information provided on the Application Form to faculty within the College of Business Administration. A faculty member then assigns a team of juniors, seniors, or graduate students to work with you in a consulting capacity under the faculty's supervision. During the semester, the team prepares a written report summarizing its findings and recommendations which, upon completion, will be provided to you.

Type of Assistance

Marketing/Sales
Accounting
Financial Management
Human Resource Management
Information Systems
Production and Operating Systems Management
Overall Business Plan

If you are interested in the services the CSB has to offer, please click the apply link on the navigation bar on the side to apply.

Services Performed

The Center does its best to serve all of the small businesses which request help. Unfortunately, it is not always able to do so because of the volume of requests.

Shown below are the number of clients served for various years, with 1969 being the first year of operation for the Center:

Year	Number Served
1969	7
1976	23
1986	82
2001	104
2002	107
2003	122
2004	169

Client requests were mainly for developing marketing strategies and/or overall business plans. Services also were requested in the areas of account/recordkeeping, designing computer systems, website design, human relations issues, and organizational structure.

Detailed records are not kept on clients by gender and ethnicity of the owner. However, it is estimated that 55.0% to 60.0% of the firms are women-owned, and 15.0% to 16.5% are minority-owned. The Center has made extensive efforts to serve to women-owned and minority businesses.

As part of their assignments, students are asked to estimate the number of hours spent directly consulting with their clients, researching relevant issue (e.g., analyzing the marketplace), and preparing final reports for t he clients. In 2003, the average amount of time spent per case was about 69.4% hours. Therefore, students spent nearly 8,475 hours working for these 122 clients.

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