Needs assessments are critical to developing relevant and effective education and training programs and marketable and useful products. By assessing target audience needs, organizations can determine a focus and direction for investments made in products or training, and extend the reach and impact of environmental programming. Needs assessments are used whenever there is a need or a want that could be fulfilled by some sort of organizational effort. In the past three decades, dozen of models for needs assessment have been suggested and implemented with varying success (Watkins, et al,. 1998). So that, due to the distinctive carachreristics of small businesses, the purpose of this paper is to report the results of validating and the pilot implementation an alternative model developed respectively.
