Web site can help small businesses learn their worth.

Long Island is the home of small business , which make up nearly 90 percent of the companies in Nassau and Suffolk counties. Yet, business experts say, small-business owners are unlikely to know the answer to one essential question: What is their business worth?

Help may be within a few clicks of the keyboard. A new free Web site, biz equity.com, is now available to provide small-business owners on the Island and elsewhere with some idea of what their store, Internet site or sales operation might be worth. The emphasis, business experts and even the founder of the site say, is on the word "might." A business owner still must talk to an accountant and do his or her own investigations. But bizequity.com is a start, Tom Taulli, founder of BizEquity Corp., which began and operates the site, said in an interview last week. Taulli once had an Internet business of his own and sold it. "I had to go through the process of evaluation," he said, recalling the experience as arduous. "I found valuation is a complicated thing, but an important thing." The Web site makes use of publicly available data to calculate a business' worth. There are other sites that have valuation calculators, but Taulli said the advantage of bizequity.com is that "we have it all in one place."

A total of 89.5 percent of the 96,199 businesses on Long Island are considered small by the Long Island Association, meaning they employ fewer than 20 people, said Pearl Kamer, an economist for the LIA, a business and civic organization. The value of many may be falling.

Bizequity.com, for example, located 411 apparel stores in Melville and some of the surrounding areas. The site said those stores' average current value is $102,252, a 17 percent decline from only six months ago. About 1,400 restaurants in the same general area were worth an average of $93,622, a 19 percent decline over the same time period, the site found. Worrisome? Yes, but essential to know, said Gloria Glowacki, assistant director and a small-business adviser at Stony Brook University's Small Business Development Center. Glowacki said she and her staff surveyed the site and liked what they saw, but "it should be used as part of a process, not the be all and end all."

Glowacki said she doubts many business owners would be able to state the value of their business: "They're just running their companies" and their value "just comes up when they need it." Taulli acknowledges figures from the site are "not something you can take to the bank." But he said, "It's a starting point."

Copyright (c) 2008, Newsday, Melville, N.Y.