WHY BROOKLINEBUSINESS.COM EXISTS
Empowering small business success.
Brookline’s independent businesses give our community its character. When rising costs and complicated information make decisions harder, owners deserve support they can actually use. This project exists to help them adapt, grow, and keep our neighborhoods vibrant.
Behind every storefront,
there’s a person.
START WITH WHAT YOU CAN USE
Start with a decision your business is facing.
Need to check whether a price increase covers your costs, compare suppliers, or plan cash flow? Try a tool with your own numbers. Looking for official guidance or local help? Browse the selected resources. You can also see how a local business question became a short research report.
Work through your numbers
Try eight tools for profit scenarios, pricing, supplier costs, cash flow, inventory, sales, and more. Start with an example or enter your own figures.
Open Business Lab ↗02Find useful documents
Go straight to selected policy guidance, program pages, local organizations, and reading. Each link says what it covers so you can choose what matters to you.
Explore the resource hub ↗03See a research example
Read the Brookline Booksmith case study and its short report to see how a local conversation became a public-data analysis.
Read the case study and report ↗WHY THESE LINKS ARE HERE
I did the searching.
You can start with the useful parts.
Collecting sources was only the first step. I read through policy pages, program information, local directories, and research to identify the material most relevant to common small-business questions. The hub brings those sources together by topic and points you to the original documents for current details.
RESEARCH THAT STARTS CLOSE TO HOME
I wanted to understand
what owners were facing.
After hearing owners talk about rising costs and new technology, I wanted to understand the larger pattern. I reviewed 25 academic studies and surveyed 10 Brookline businesses, including one participant who requested anonymity. I looked at how owners were responding to costs, how many used data or AI tools, and what would help make those tools useful.
Read my published paper ↗Percentages are rounded from nine responses, as reported in the research. The study surveyed ten businesses in total, one of which requested anonymity. This small local sample is not a representative estimate of all Brookline businesses.
Avyaya Jha · FounderABOUT THE FOUNDER
Hi, I’m Avyaya.
I’m a senior at Brookline High School and the founder of BrooklineBusiness.com. I began by speaking with local business owners about rising costs, technology, and the decisions they face day to day.
I surveyed local businesses, shared the findings with Chamber leaders, and built the tools and resource lists on this site around the questions I heard.
More about my work ↗A VOICE FROM THE COMMUNITY
“It’s much harder on smaller businesses than on the large ones”
Putterham Grille · Brookline, MA
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