Your mum has a friend who has just been left with some money by an elderly relative. She is thinking of starting a business but she is not quite sure what she wants to do or exactly where she wants to set up her business. Your mum has been talking to her and explained that you’re a brilliant business studies student, so they have come up with a clever idea! You could put your skills to work as a business consultant and do some research to find out if there is room for another business in Chorlton.

As a business consultant you will need to write a report. I have been asked to find out whether or not there is room for another business in Chorlton. To do this I will have to design a questionnaire, which will be suitable, to ask the public. The questionnaire that I have designed will be changed into a data capture form because the respondents will not want to spend time on filling in a questionnaire, as this will be quite time consuming.

Whereas, the data capture form that I intend to produce will be quite effective as it will not take as long as a questionnaire to complete, and most of the questions on this will have choices i. e. a, b, c, d, etc. To come to a conclusion of what type of business should be opened, where and why I will choose this part of Chorlton, I will produce a shopping classification table to show all the shops that are already in Chorlton.

This will be done so that I can compare the results from my questionnaire to look at what types of shops the respondents would like to see if a new business was to be opened in Chorlton. Primary Research is when you go out and gather the information yourself which will be up to date and accurate. You can trust and rely on this piece of information. The disadvantage is that collecting the information can be quite time consuming or it can be expensive. Secondary Research is when you find the information on the Internet or from books.

The advantages of this are that it’s unlimited, valid, cheap and also quick and easy to gather. The disadvantages of secondary research is that it could be out of date, cannot be trusted and you can get a lot of irrelevant information. To collect the information that I needed to come to a conclusion about whether or not there is room to open up another business, I went out to Chorlton to get some answers for my questionnaire (a copy of the questionnaire can be found in the appendix) and to find out what type of shop is missing and if there is any room to open up a new business.

I also had to find out what the competition was like in Chorlton so I produced a shopping classification table to show all the shops in Chorlton. (See appendix for a copy of the shopping classification table). I asked the respondents at a random selection to make sure I didn’t have a biased sample. The advantages of random selection is that there’s an equal chance of being chosen and it also prevents us from choosing a bias sample of people of whom we want to approach or who we think look approachable.

The disadvantages of random selection is that it can be generalised to the population and you might pick more than one type of gender e. g. 21 males and 4 females. In future I would have used a different sampling method to give me a more accurate and reliable source/response to actually give a recommendation. I would have used a stratified sampling method towards age and gender or ethnicity (if applicable) living in the area. I could use the Manchester Census to do this as it will give me an accurate set of results.