When Shawn Haynes was little, his best times where spent near campfires. For the next decades, the sight and smell of raw pine made him feel good. So one day in 2005, he quit his lucrative job at Amazon and hired a professional furniture designer to make home decor from the sleek pale woods of the Northwest forest.
Realizing an entrepreneurial dream such as his is very difficult. But during the grueling start-up phase of meetings, licenses, permits, fees, building codes and sales tax rates, Haynes got a lot of help from a surprising resource. He went to the library across the street.
"While we were setting up here the first six months, I went there to look up building permits and to have teleconferences, they have a conference room you can use," said Haynes. "It was our virtual office."
May people don't think of the library as an important resource for businesses, said Betsy Lewis, the Managing Librarian of the Monroe Public Library. But she hopes that will change, especially as the library has recently launched a new suite of services aimed directly at supporting small businesses.
Anyone with a library card can go to the library and get online on one of seven computers and access Business Source Premier by going to www.sno-isle.org and clicking the Research Tools, then the Business and Personal Finance Tools tabs. A smorgasbord of information is available on the site, including profiles of other companies, industry profiles, demographic information searchable by region and drive-time, and much more.
"It's something new we're just rolling out," said Lewis. "It's a way for businesses to analyze business decisions. You can target direct mail, media buys and everything using it."
To demonstrate the program's efficacy, she named a project "hotel," and began researching a location for it, deciding on the intersection of Blueberry Lane and North Kelsey Street. The program made the demographics of the nearby residents available, as well as revealing the makeup of nearby businesses, the financial profile of the surrounding community, and traffic counts on nearby roads and streets. "This is a very powerful tool," said Lewis. There is also a link to sample business plans, and much more.
But many of the libraries offerings are more prosaic. There's free wi-fi, and although use of the large conference room is reserved for non-profit organizations, there is a first-come, first-served study room in the back that makes for an excellent meeting space.
And the library can save a start up business a fair amount of money.
"It costs a couple of hundred dollars to buy the book on the international fire codes," said Haynes. "So I just checked it out and read what I needed."
That and other reference books and materials such as building codes are available and can be loaned for use within the library, said Lewis.
And the library remains a place for more in-depth research than the internet can offer.
"We researched finishes and supplies," said Haynes. Librarians recently helped a glass bead-maker find information on the chemistry of glass-making.
And if the local library can't help a business person, they most likely can find a library that can. "The way we're set up, we have four reference centers that each have a subject specialty so what we can't do here, we refer to them," said Lewis. For example, a woman came to the library recently looking for help with filing a patent for a bra she had developed that was gentler for the patients of chemotherapy.
That is a job for the Lynnwoood library, said Lewis.
Three years after opening beginning the business startup phase, Haynes is doing well. He is now supplying furniture to several new resorts, including one in West Yellowstone.
He recommends the library as a resource for other businesses starting up. "It's a great resource in terms of connecting to the internet to having meetings, there's other things you can research and saved us some money," he said.
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