Thesis Advisor First Meeting

1. Narrow down the objective of the workshop and ask business owners:

• Increase community engagement
• Collaborate on solving a challenge together
• Support and access to tools and resources

2. The prototype of follow-up meetings:

• Ask small business owners to reflect, what’s the value of these workshops to them?
• What are their barriers to completing tasks?
• Define their vision, what does success look like 5/10 years from now?

3. Redefine my personas and their needs:

• Small business owners
• Advocate (non-profit helping small businesses)
• BID board member

4. Create a wider survey to discover business owners aspirations, mindsets, and behavior to define better the personas.

5. Make a list of Insights (what business owners want/need) → Criteria (what my service is doing) → Feature (tangible form/what are the tools + resources)

6. BID (Business Improvement District:

• Talk to someone at BID
• List the pros and cons of the BID for small businesses

7. Presentation narrative: use a specific use case

8. Refine problem and how might we statement

9. Define the theory of change

10. Create a framework to help make sense of my existing data (interviews, workshops, class feedback, secondary research), use tools like Airtable.

Here are few resources she shared:

• Small Business Survey example
• Small Business Economic Profile NYC
• Organization for Economic Co-Operations and Development Framework for Small/Medium Enterprise Policies and Programs
• Resources for NYC BIDs
• Community Engagement Assistance
• NYC Business Improvement District Trends Report