Smarter Decisions; How Independent Consultants Can Use Real Research
- Susan Tatum
- 42 minutes ago
- 23 min read
In this episode of Stop the Noise, Susan Tatum talks with Jay Ballenberger about how independent consultants can make better business decisions by using real research instead of relying solely on instinct or AI. Jay explains how low-cost, high-value research uncovers opportunities, prevents costly mistakes, and builds momentum. He also shares practical ways to access data from libraries and universities, and why you don’t need to outsource research if you have a clear process and the right guide.
Notes from the Show
Research isn’t just a checkbox - done right, it builds clarity, confidence, and momentum for consultants.
Industry, competitor, and customer research each provide unique insights; together they create a fuller picture for decision-making.
AI can help analyze and structure data, but it doesn’t have access to everything and can “make things up” - it’s a tool, not a substitute.
Libraries and universities offer powerful (often free or low-cost) resources that independent consultants can tap into for market data and insights.
Research is most effective when consultants are directly involved, supported by a clear process and a trusted guide.
Quotes to Remember:
“When you’re everything to everyone, you’re nothing to anyone.” (on generalization vs. focus in business decisions)
“AI won’t tell you your idea is terrible - it will tell you what you want to hear. Real research gives you reality.”
What’s Inside:
The power behind quality research.
How to use AI for success during Market Research.
The unique perspective industry reports can bring.
How to find and access quality resources and research.
Mentioned in this Episode:
Transcribed by AI Susan Tatum 0:00
Welcome to stop the noise. I'm Susan Tatum, and today I'm talking with Jay Ballenberger, an experienced research strategist and former business librarian who helps consultants and small business owners make smarter, faster decisions using real research, not just instinct or AI Jay and I dig into the kind of low cost, high value research that independent consultants often overlook, and how to use it to uncover opportunities, avoid costly mistakes and build confidence in your next move. He also shares how to access data you can't get from AI, what to expect from university libraries and public resources and why you don't need to outsource this. Just have a clear process and the right guide. If you're rethinking your positioning, exploring a new offer, or trying to prioritize where to focus Next, you'll find this episode packed with practical advice. Let's dive in.
Susan Tatum 1:02
Jay Ballenberger, welcome to stop the noise.
Jay Ballenberger 1:05
Thanks, Susan, I appreciate you having me.
Susan Tatum 1:08
Oh, it's great to see you here. Quick question for you. You've helped hundreds of small businesses and consultants make smarter decisions and spot better opportunities and avoid costly mistakes, I think by using real research, not just instinct or AI,
Jay Ballenberger 1:25
absolutely, yeah, I come from the world of libraries. I was a academic librarian at one point and moved into a role that I didn't seek. I sought it out, but I I wasn't anticipating getting into it, but it but it was a business librarianship role at the Denver Public Library, where I through my time there, spent both networking with the small business community and all the different support organizations, mostly on the front range of Colorado, which is the Denver boulder Fort Collins, Colorado Springs area, and then working one on one with small businesses to help find relevant resources that could help them make better decisions about related to market research and the business ideas that they had. Some businesses were well established and needed real specific answers to questions that they had, and other businesses or people were we they had concepts for for business ideas. And so we would spend about an hour we as librarians, would spend about an hour prior to meeting with them, finding resources and putting together a research guide that would help guide them through those resources, and then we would spend an hour one on one with them, usually in a video consult or in person, going through those resources, a lot of the the and talking to them and learning, you know, the ins and outs, a little bit more about what they were trying to do. And because the resources at the library weren't always super intuitive, they were a little hard, you know, hard to get to understand how to use we would be there to teach them how to use them, and put them in front of these resources so that they could move on with their their research and learn about potential viability, you know, of their business ideas. So that's, that's a little bit of how we did it
Susan Tatum 3:19
when you're talking about small businesses or independent consultants, that that's what most of our listeners are here. Do you find that a lot of them tend to skip the step of doing market research or the right kind of research?
Jay Ballenberger 3:36
You know, I don't know if they skip it as much as it seems to be check box on their long list of to do's that they try to get through and sometimes don't. Yeah, I think, you know, the the term research can scare people off a little bit. And I think it just seems a little dry and little boring, maybe where the the real fun parts of their their businesses are probably working with the people and working with clients, or, you know, doing tactical marketing and things like that. And so I think it put people in a position where they needed, they knew they needed to do it, especially if they were being referred to from other advisors that they might have been working with. We worked in partnership with a lot of small business development centers and other like I said, support organizations, where a lot of times people were getting one on one advising from other professionals, and those professionals tended to refer them over to the library, saying, You need to get some data on this. What are the growth statistics? What are the trends happening in the industry. So I think once they learned a little bit more about the specifics of what they needed, they really saw the value in it. But yeah, I think it tends to not be the first thing that small businesses think about when, when really contemplating strategy and trying to best understand where to put their time effort, resources when, when they are building a business,
Susan Tatum 5:03
I find that with the consultants that I work with and and talk to, they they have this burning desire to help. I mean, they're experts in something. They've built careers in the corporate world for the most part, and they're just so excited about helping, using their knowledge to help people, and it often doesn't occur to them or nor have they, have they had a reason to understand that there's, there are some questions that should be answered. So when we talked before we've I think we've talked a couple of times before you've said that good research leads to better decisions and also to momentum. So tell tell us more about what that looks like.
Jay Ballenberger 5:44
Sure, I think when you're starting out. And again, if this is new to you, and the reason you're starting a business is because you have a passion that you want to make your livelihood from, we don't always know what resources are going to help us make those decisions. And so again, I think it starts out like any research, where it's very muddy, it's very cloudy. You really don't know what you're doing until you start getting your hands on particular resources, reading through them a little bit, and getting context for the landscape as a whole. And as you start picking up on pieces of that landscape, and they become a little bit more defined. There begins this sort of a snowball effect that happens. The process that I like to take people through starts with looking at industry research, and that can be the most daunting, actually, it's almost I've questioned whether that's the best place to start with a lot of people, because it can be very ethereal, dry, theoretical, a little bit out there, not always directly. You know, doesn't seem directly relevant to maybe a small business in a particular geographic area, but what it does is it really lays the groundwork for who are buying certain types of things like what they might be researching, researching on their industry, what household incomes are more likely to be purchasing over others, what demographic features, what psychographic features of clients and customers are, what the you know, what the the other competitors might be doing. And so when you start analyzing in that systematic way of industry research, then competitor research, and then understanding who your customers might be, the third big area, it really puts into perspective that, let's say, your competitors, that you might have looked at as these impenetrable, well established businesses, that they have kinks in their armor and that they don't do things as well as you originally thought they might, or that your ideas, or the way that you approach a particular service or product that you're developing, that you have a you have a different passion and a different way to look at it that isn't being represented by those others. And when you start noticing those types of openings and those gaps, that's where that snowballing, I think really is noticeable. And it gets to a point where as you, as you, as you get more clarification, you really start seeing a direction to take these things. And it yes, it brings enthusiasm, and it brings momentum, and I think that that's something that I've really loved to see. And you, you know, like any teaching that little aha moment that happens, you see it when, when the light bulb goes on working with somebody in that capacity. So, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a cool thing to see happen.
Susan Tatum 8:38
Tell me a little bit more about what? When you say industry research, I refer to myself as a recovering marketer from years ago. So my mind goes to market type research, which you used some examples of that. What? What are the questions that businesses or consultants should be asking?
Jay Ballenberger 8:59
Yeah, well, first of all, I think a thing that throws people off is they don't I'll speak less for consultants for a moment, a little bit more at smaller businesses, they often are more nichey than they might originally think they are. Again, if you're opening a restaurant, that's one thing, but if you have a service that you provide that takes the skill that you had in a professional capacity, and you're moving it into, you know, your own business, it often, you know, we it's, it's, like I said, it's a little niche, niche year than we might think. And so it's sometimes hard to find market reports that really hone in on that nicheness, if you will, or the geographic location that you might be in. And so when I take people, I give them very high elevation views of their industry, and they might straddle multiple industries. And so there's often not just like the perfect industry report that's out there that's gonna tell you everything. That you need to know about, the the trends that are happening, the you know, the the revenue potential, the profit potential, you know, just, just basic trends. And again, the landscape of maybe four or five years out, as as anticipated by these reports. And so I tend to put people in front of three, four, maybe five, different industry reports, and allow them to sort of sift through those as a very as objectively as they can, sort of the fly on the wall with a with a market report, not making any judgments, but just observing, taking in things that seem relevant to what their vision is for their business. Once that's done, I really try not to make any decisions at that point with any of these things. What it's going to do is maybe point us to our next steps But
Susan Tatum 10:50
can you, I hate to interrupt you, but when we talked previously, you used an example of a catering business that really brought it home for me, even though I'm not in the catering business. But do Can you like, apply that in these what you're talking about here? I think that would be helpful.
Jay Ballenberger 11:06
Yeah, absolutely. So I had worked with a catering business that was not on the front range in Colorado, is in another area of Colorado that's less populated. And anyways, we had used an IBIS World Report, which is sort of the gold standard of Industry Reports. I can talk more about those and how to get access to those, but we found one for catering in the United States. So it's broad. It wasn't focused geographically on where this person was, per se, but it gave us these big overviews of trends that were happening. One of the major trends that we were seeing was that catering, a big portion of catering, a big segment of the revenue that comes from Catering is from weddings and serving serving wedding parties. But the trends have been over the last five to 10 years that weddings are declining, and there's a foreseeable continuation of that decline in weddings. And so as we thought about that, we decided maybe that doesn't that shouldn't be our focus. It's not always a perfect match to just ignore weddings, because they still make up a big portion of the segments of the revenue, a large segment of the revenue. And so what we found is that the place where this person was operating was in an area that has quite a large retirement community. And over the last 2025, 30 years, actually, this area has sort of marketed itself to the aging population as a re as a an affordable retirement community, and it just got us thinking about things as we then looked into the other caterers as competitors. We noticed that nobody was serving, was serving this aging population in a way that got a little I don't know if it's morbid, it's the right way or not, but there are a lot of funerals. There are a lot of people aging, who are passing away in that area. We learned that there was this opening to have as a channel in their business to be focusing on funeral management, basically funeral managers and this also, I have to step back a bit, because that was all based on the industry report we saw. But the other thing as a personal level, the personal level for that business, is they had done a lot of wedding catering, and they really didn't like it. They felt like, you know, this was this huge day in these people's lives, and everything had to be perfect, and everything was really stressful, not only for the wedding party, but for the caterers as well. And they said they kind of wanted to get away from having that kind of stressful employment on this, you know, supposed to be the most perfect day of these people's lives. And so that was another thing. And we noticed that when the tragedy of somebody passing away occurs, is the family has too much to be considered, you know, considering and thinking about they need to be taken care of. But there isn't that same angst. And I don't know what is it the bride Zilla or God, you know, groom Zilla activities. And so, you know, you're serving a really important purpose in the timelines of these people's lives. But, but it just, it just, it just showed us that there's these other opportunities, and it was conducive to the the market in that area, so
Susan Tatum 14:28
which would be very difficult to come up with if you're just sitting around brainstorming,
Jay Ballenberger 14:34
right. Yeah, exactly.
Susan Tatum 14:36
So I think the elephant in the room that I want to go ahead and address, because you have so much good stuff here, and I don't want listeners to be sitting there thinking, Well, why can't I just use AI? Why isn't that enough? So what's your what's your response to that?
Jay Ballenberger 14:51
Sure, sure. So we're obviously living in an AI moment, and it's the talk of the town, and but for me, I think. What it comes down to is AI is another tool in our toolbox. As a librarian, I just have my skeptics glasses on at at all times, regardless whether it's like I mentioned those Ibis reports before, whether it's something from a Google search and a blog posting that I saw, I'm always gonna have a bit of skepticism on something so it doesn't stop because, you know, AI is this wonderful new tool. I use it, but I also use it with caution. And, in fact, I really caution people starting, no, I don't, I shouldn't say that. I think is a really great place to help you start planning your research and kind of helping you sort of spitball ideas about what would be beneficial for a business, whatever kind it is, whether it's a consulting business, whether it's a small business, service business, a product that you get, sort of a plan in place and AI is really great thing To do that with. Where I think it breaks down is that AI, even though it, you know, these large language learning models have access to a lot of open web data that they harvest in order to be making these predictive analysis, or, you know, generative, predictive AI responses when you when you write a prompt, they don't get everywhere, and they don't pull from every resource that could be valuable. So for instance, a few library resources that I think are amazing are things like a lot of people have heard of, what's called Reference USA. It's now called Data axle, but it's a business and and residential directory, and it allows certain businesses, depending on what they're doing, to either find competitors that they might not have known about by different industries and different geographies, but also residents. And so if you're selling something to certain people, you can learn about what is being purchased in certain neighborhoods over you know, and where more spending is happening for this type of product versus this type of product or this type of service. And so that type of thing is just not accessible. They put those kinds of tools, they put a lot of protections on the harvest ability of their data. And so it just goes to show that AI doesn't have access to everything, and it is known to kind of tell you what you want to hear, right? It doesn't ever say, oh, that's an awful idea, and you should get a day job. It says, Yeah, this is amazing. You're such a smart person for thinking about this, because it, you know, it's it's UI and UX are are made to to satisfy the user. And so again, I use it. I use it in different ways. I tend to, instead of using it to harvest and find research, for me, I tend to do the research of finding good resources. And a lot of times I'll take those resources like an ibis report or other first research industry profile, and I will upload it into a chat or an AI tool and ask it to bring back certain things, you know, certain trends, certain profit margins, certain certain things like that, versus just saying, find this information for me. Tell me what you know the market is looking like in my area. I don't like it to go out, find the research and bring it back to me. I like to provide it ways to analyze and help me think about the resources that I already know are pretty good and have have good reputations, are authoritative and so on so forth.
Susan Tatum 18:44
And you had a great story the first time we talked about it was an author or something, somebody was looking for their both the blog articles,
Jay Ballenberger 18:51
yeah, so I can't remember even the I don't remember the person's name, or I could definitely go find this article again. But it was basically an academic who, for most of his last 2025 years, had been a blogger as well. So I think he was in the humanities, social sciences, something along those lines, had written 1000s of blog entries, maybe hundreds, not, not sure the exact number, but he had used AI to find a few past articles on a subject that he had written about in the past. So he kind of wrote a prompt asking it to bring back these articles. It was sort of on these subjects, put in, put in the prompt, and he received back three or four names of articles that he looked at and said, you know, the titles didn't, he didn't quite remember writing them. Is basically what it was. He's, I don't think that looks like an article that I wrote. But he also then went back and said, Well, I want those, the references for where you found that. And so for the articles that came back, there were URLs that came back. As well. And he clicked on the URLs, and they went to, you know, these 404 errors that didn't, didn't show up. And what he discovered was that the AI had gone into his blog, onto his URL, found the blogs, understood the content that he was writing, matched it up with the prompt and the the subject that he was searching for, and it generated because it's, it's predictive generative AI is it predicted some names. It hallucinated names of articles that he had not written and and he included the same naming convention for the URLs as previous blog posts, but they were articles that did not exist, had never existed and and that was, that was the lesson there, is that it'll bring back and serve you what what you want to you know have brought back to you
Susan Tatum 20:53
so well So I think you've hit on some really important things there. One is that it doesn't have access to all of the information that there is out there in particular. You didn't say this, but I find that it's not terribly up to date. Like, I don't know where chat GPT is right now, but it's it doesn't know what happened today. And there are places you know, even something as simple as LinkedIn, that it can't always get to. And then it does. It does make stuff up like that. I'm constantly having to say, Did this really happen? Go back and look at the transcript and the well, we're not really asking it to be creative. I was going to say you're only going to get something that's already happened because it is. It is just predicting stuff based on what the most common next word would be, or something like that. I mean, that's a good explanation of it, but so now you've got me all freaked out about about using AI for
Jay Ballenberger 21:52
again, my my intention is not to dissuade anyone from using it. It's just knowing that it's a tool. It has limitations, and it's, it's, it's a tool of many, one of many of, you know, one of many tools. And there are a lot of other tools out there, you know. Again, my state in Colorado has a strong library presence, and we have an interesting situation that not every state is this way, but we have a number of really big libraries that are well funded, that have policies that allow any resident of the state of Colorado to use them, so any person that doesn't, you know, isn't a resident of Denver can still access the Denver Public Library's resources, or the Jefferson County Public Library, or the Pikes Peak County, you Know, library, or Pikes Peak. Other states are like that, but some states are not. Some are very, very restricted to locations, and they just don't allow that. Another really big thing, I would say, especially for consultants, if they're working with with other businesses, is that any university nearby that has any business programs, tends to have databases that are incredible and are very expensive to access. Had if you needed to do that on your own, but because of the buying power you know of a university, you can often go, you have to, often physically go to that library. So you might have to take a day and and go down to the library. But you can, you can office and bring your own device, your own laptop or Padlet or something, and you can go get on the guest. Get on as a guest. You know the guest Wi Fi. When you're on the Wi Fi of the universities, it recognizes you as being locally on that Wi Fi and it allow you access. You tend not to be able to get it remotely, unless you're affiliated with that university somehow. But that's a great way that people can spend half a day go down to the library, download some reports, some industry reports, let's say, even ask a reference librarian for a little help if they run into any troubles and have those resources available to them for further analysis further down the line, where then you can upload them into chatgpt ask for, you know, to bring you back some things and to help you analyze and process what you're seeing in those reports.
Susan Tatum 24:17
So I was gonna ask, How do you know what to use, like, like, going into a university. I mean, I would have to ask some I'd have to say, this is what I'm looking for. Maybe you could do that ahead of time. But you said there are librarians there that can point you in the right direction.
Jay Ballenberger 24:34
In general, yeah, typically, there's going to be, they tend to be called Ask Us desks at this point where they're kind of answering all sorts of questions, but they're typically staffed by trained, you know, professional librarians. So if they're not, you might say, is there any way that a public user of the library can speak with one of the reference librarians? Because a lot of universities do have student workers. They're not. They don't have masters of libraries, as you know. Library science degrees. So, you know, they may not have that expertise, but they could put you in front of someone to be able to do that otherwise, you know, there are depending on the part of the process that you're undertaking. So again, I had briefly mentioned, I take people through industry research, and then that kind of helps us understand what our competitor research might be, and then understanding what competitors are doing and finding positions for ourselves can lead into who our target audiences or our customers. And so that customer research is another one. And so each of those three, you know, buckets of research areas have different tools that that can satisfy them. So again, did certain industry reports. I had mentioned ibis, world first, research industry profiles, Plunkett reports. There's a lot of established organizations that build really well done, well researched, thorough Industry Reports. Then competitors, you can do things using directories. And so I mentioned one called Data axle, and there's many others. And then on the customer side, there's a lot of tools that do market segmentation, where it breaks down the entire consuming population in the United States into real, specific market profiles, and it gives psychographic information about, you know, buying preferences and and channel preferences in terms of how they like to be advertised to or not advertised to, and desires, and all these different really interesting things that you can you can focus on and get information about.
Susan Tatum 26:36
So how much I mean, I know the and I know the answer is going to be, it depends. But if you it's like, how long and involved is is this in order to, let's say you're starting a consulting business, or maybe you're thinking about pivoting or starting a new service, or something like that, how long does something like this take to do a halfway decent job of
Jay Ballenberger 26:59
Yeah, it's a great question, and although it does depend, like you say, I think a really good estimate is, and this isn't all the time that you're going to be spending, you know, on on this, but some of this stuff needs time to sort of percolate, and you know, you need to sleep on it a little bit and concentrate on a little bit. But I would say within a two month period of time, if you are working in a neighborhood of four or five hours a week on your market research for, let's say, six to eight weeks, you're going to have climbed a mountain that you won't have to climb ever again. You'll, you know, you'll spend some time on that on that industry research, it's going to inform how you might spend some time on your competitor research, which is going to lead into how much time you could spend on some customer research. And all through that process, I really encourage people that I work with to be doing customer discovery interviews, where you're testing your assumptions and you're asking real people about the things that you're finding in the research to test whether that makes sense for for your ideal customer. Now, when you do that, that's, I mean, that's a not many people, I think, really take the time to go through that type of process, but when they do, they're afforded many more opportunities than they ever could have potentially seen on their own or just dreamt up. And then what it allows you to do is follow that one that fits your your values and your vision and the things that excite you the most. And I think these are things that need maintenance over time. So I would say a year later, you might come back and you review these things a little bit, but at that point it might be a week or two weeks of kind of concentrating on it to just Okay, have things drastically changed. Things don't tend to turn completely on their heads, but you know, you need to stay updated with some of these things. So I think there's a there's a maintenance aspect of it that would be very wise of the business to revisit, probably annually, maybe near the end of the the, you know, the year, the fiscal year and and just kind of setting yourself up for the quarters ahead that you're going to be kind of planning for. So that's, that's how I would say that a deep dive that you again wouldn't have to do twice, would would probably be in the neighborhood of six to eight weeks and not full time either, just just kind of consistent over that time.
Susan Tatum 29:26
It sounds like, if you are fortunate enough to live in a state like Colorado, or live near a university, or something like that, a large university, that this could be done at very little expense other than your time and asking a lot of questions.
Jay Ballenberger 29:42
Yeah, exactly. I think that's what I see as kind of, I guess, again, coming from the library world, there's no shortage of resources. You know, yes, you could hire somebody to do all this for you. But in my opinion, the owner and the person operating a business has to be in the driver's seat to make the connections between the resources. I think it's best done by the owner, the start, you know, the founder, along with a partner you know, so a collaborative advisor, kind of role that can help brainstorm, think about ideas, kind of push away ideas that don't seem as relevant, and just be someone to, yeah, to help guide the process, help help with accountability, but also be a sounding board. So I think that, to me, seems like, almost like the perfect mix of this, if you hire it all out. And I've, I've been asked to do this for others. I just don't always know the direction that people would most want to take things. I can give them certain answers to certain things, but it may not align and and if you, if you get misaligned too early in the process, you might take the research off in a direction that's of no use to that, you know, to the desires and the direction that someone wants to go. So it's so, so important for the, for the for the business owner or the consultant to be, you know, to be part of that process
Susan Tatum 31:10
and have the right kind of guide through it. It's, it seems like otherwise, yeah, you could, you could make the wrong decisions. You could, you could really, really get yourself in a mess, and have it take too long. Well, thank you so much for being here. Jay, this is great. Is there anything I should have asked you?
Jay Ballenberger 31:27
That's a great question. That's like the the end of an interview, question that I forgot to anticipate. I, you know, I, I'm not sure, Susan, I think for me, I think what's really interesting is that this process is so transferable, you wouldn't believe the variety of business types that I have worked with and continue to get to work with as a small business owner. So I think what's really great is that the process is to be trusted, no matter what kind of business is involved and what kind of consulting someone might be involved with, and something that I really love too, I think to add to that is that I love getting to work with consultants, to show them these tools. Because, again, the consultants are the ones that tend to have had all the different experiences of working with different types of businesses, and when they see a particular tool that then can be patched into this process. Again, that's where the light bulbs go off, and they, you can just tell that because of their experience and them having been and worked with so many different business types that they can see, oh, this tool would be great for this type of business, doing this type of thing. Oh, and I had a business that would have really been, you know, this, this would have been really amazing to be able to get us to learn about this and, you know, X, Y and Z, but I think those are some of the things, the scope and the range of the business types, and then kind of activating consultants, to be able to be taking some of these tools and using them again that are freely available often, you know, at libraries nearby is it's something I think it's overlooked.
Susan Tatum 33:06
Well, cool, that's that's very helpful. Thank you. For folks that want to follow up with you, maybe they've got some more questions about this research stuff. What's the best way for them to do that
Jay Ballenberger 33:18
right now? It's LinkedIn. So you can find me by searching my name, Jay Balenberger. I have my my academic credentials, the ML is, which is a Masters of Library Science, library and information science along there. So you can distinguish me from other Jay Ballenbergers, which is probably not going to happen, but, but yeah, Jay ballenberger on LinkedIn is the best place now.
Susan Tatum 33:42
and we'll put that in the show notes. And as well, as if there, if there are any of these resources that you mentioned that you think might be helpful for us to put in the show notes, we can do that too.
Jay Ballenberger 33:57
Wonderful.
Susan Tatum 33:58
Well, thank you so much, Jay.
Jay Ballenberger 33:57
I appreciate you having me
Susan Tatum 34:00
been an eye opener.
Jay Ballenberger 34:01
Great. I'm glad I can provide the insights. Thanks for having me
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