PLEDGE OF CONFIDENTIALITY

The E3-Center pledges to every business owner that the data you provide about your company will only be used as part of an aggregate combined pool of data from hundreds of companies around the United States, so that your individual company-specific data will never be shared (e.g.: marketing-sales organizations), published, cited, distributed, or used in any manner other than as part of the aggregate combined data for the E3-Center's Small Business Barometer. Your data will be closely guarded and only 2 people will have access to the overall database - the E3 webmaster and me, Dr. David Newton, the founder and director of the center and manager of the Small Business Barometer. 

In addition, no proprietary data about your company's sales, costs, profits, assets, debt, and/or equity will be requested for use in the Small Business Barometer.  Instead, Barometer's combined index will only poll bustiness owners about relative measures such as "percentage changes" between one period and another, and "Yes/No" "Agree/Disagree" questions about various kinds of company activities and/or opinions about the overall U.S. economy.  The strong value to business owners that comes from the analysis for the E3 Small Business Barometer is its ACCURACY and RELIABILITY - that the data provided by the surveyed companies is truthful, in that business owners have answered the surveys based on actual company results, rather than on how they would like their firm to be perceived.  Because the Barometer never published anything about any individual company, this removes any incentive to answer the survey in a more positive or more negative manner, because the real value to business owners nationwide is a Barometer index that reflects the truth about business activities and the decisions of entrepreneurs.

On behalf of all the staff and the Advisory Board at the E3-Center, thank you for participating in this very timely periodic survey of small businesses all across the United States.  Our vision is that the E3 Small Business Barometer will become the most reliable, accurate, and trusted measure of entrepreneurial activity nationwide, and an excellent indicator of how the overall U.S. will be doing in the near-term, intermediate-term, and long-term following.

Dr. David Newton 
Founder and Director, The E3-Center and The E3 Small Business Barometer