Business Development Services

Training and technical assistance are areas in which microenterprise programs invest substantial resources and clients invest a great deal of time. In fact, these services are provided by more than 90 percent of all microenterprise development organizations.

FIELD has developed numerous resources for practitioners, including work on Scaling Business Development Services. FIELD's work aimed at helping practitioners improve the quality of their microenterprise training and technical assistance services, includes:

  • Developing the Best Practices Guides, a series of training modules designed to help practitioners deliver more effective training and technical assistance to low-income clients.
  • Managing the Effectiveness of Training and Technical Assistance grant cluster beginning in 1999, which provided five organizations with two-year grants to conduct research into what constitutes effective training and technical assistance services.

Using grants from the Small Business Administration and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, FIELD created these Best Practice Guides based on lessons extracted from our past work and input from leading practitioners, who served as advisors:

FIELD Best Practice Guide: Volume 6
Staying Connected: Building Entrepreneurial Networks establishes a rationale for a conscious approach to networking by presenting several examples of successful networks and detailing the ways microenterprise organizations have fostered their clients' development of these networks.

FIELD Best Practice Guide: Volume 5
Business First: Using Technology to Advance Microenterprise Development introduces a framework for selecting and planning technology that supports business objectives, and offers insights into how programs can assist microentrepreneurs with business automation, on-line learning and Web-based marketing.

FIELD Best Practice Guide: Volume 4
Keeping It Personalized: Consulting, Coaching & Mentoring for Microentrepreneurs provides a summary of findings from research in business consulting, coaching and mentoring with case-study examples of best practices in all three types of technical assistance targeted to low-income clients.

FIELD Best Practice Guide: Volume 3
Training for Microenterprise Development: A Guide to Curricula identifies the characteristics of an effective business-planning curriculum for low-income clients and reviews a set of products currently being marketed to practitioners.

FIELD Best Practice Guide: Volume 2
Building Skills for Self-Employment: Basic Training for Microentrepreneurs offers best practices in core training and their implications for improving training services.

FIELD Best Practice Guide: Volume 1
Entering the Relationship: Finding and Assessing Microenterprise Training Clients explores how program practitioners can conduct market research, develop effective marketing strategies, and appropriately screen and assess incoming clients.

Entrepreneur Profiles: A Mushrooming Business & Mother of Invention
To read about small businesses that benefited from a range of training and technical assistance services, please visit our entrepreneur profiles.