When I tell people Infusionsoft’s purpose is to help small businesses succeed, I generally get approving nods from the audience. Whether I’m talking to an individual or a group, there is a sense of agreement, a feeling that as we talk about “small businesses,” we are speaking the same language.
Our conversation feels so warm and fuzzy: baseball, small business, apple pie and America. But as the conversation progresses, red flags of miscommunication start to go up.
“So, who else is serving SMBs in your market?”
“Would I recognize the names of any of your customers?”
“I have a friend who works for IBM selling into small businesses.”
My responses are:
“I never said anything about mid-sized businesses or SMBs; almost certainly not; and IBM doesn’t know squat about small businesses.”
Okay, maybe I’m not so blunt about it, but it’s clear to me that my counterpart(s) and I are not thinking alike when we talk about small businesses.
And yet, the fact remains that Infusionsoft is in existence to help small businesses succeed.
So, what’s a small business?
Is it IBM’s definition of “companies with under 1000 employees and/or less than $500 million in annual revenue?”
Is a “small business” a company with under 500 employees, as the Small Business Administration defines it?
Or is it a company with under 15 employees, as Australia defines it?
Ask 10 people to define “small business” and you’ll get 10 answers. To some people, this may not be a big deal. But to us at Infusionsoft, it’s a huge deal. Why? Because our purpose is to help small businesses succeed. If you’re a one-man shop, you have different needs and challenges than a business with 10 employees. And you have widely different needs and challenges than a 100-person company. If a vendor says they serve small businesses (or worse, “SMBs”) and what they mean by that is “companies with under 500 employees,” then the family business with five employees is going to feel totally under-served by that vendor.
Surprisingly, nobody has taken the time to really define for the world what small business means. Until now.
For the past 10 years, we’ve been serving small businesses. We have studied hundreds of thousands of small businesses. We’ve written books on small business, studied the success of small business and pointed out the inconsistencies of vendors claiming to serve small business. In particular, I’ve spent hundreds of hours studying the US Census Bureau’s data regarding small businesses. I became fascinated with the Census Bureau data a few years ago when Scott and I wrote Conquer the Chaos. I’m actually slightly embarrassed by the spreadsheets I’ve developed and the time I’ve spent studying this data.
All of our research has led to the frustrating conclusion that there are so many classifications of small business, it’s almost impossible to make sense of it all.
Well, it’s time to make sense of it all. It’s time to create a language around small business that serves small businesses so they can get the products and services they need, instead of the products and services vendors want to sell.
That last part of the prior sentence is important… and controversial. See, the unfortunate truth is, if a vendor sells a product that is built and priced for companies with 100 employees, when they call it a “small business solution” they know they’ll bring in a bunch of businesses with under 20 employees. After all, that’s where the numbers are: over 98% of US businesses have under 20 employees.
In other words, vendors who want to sell stuff to small businesses are all too happy to stay vague about who they serve, hoping they’ll pick up a bunch of customers their product wasn’t meant to serve.
Am I being too harsh toward vendors? Maybe. But the sad truth is that most small businesses are totally under-served with over-built solutions that are designed for “SMBs.” As we like to say at Infusionsoft, “SMB” really means “smaller mid-sized businesses.”
At Infusionsoft, we aren’t interested in smaller mid-sized businesses. We are interested in small businesses–SBs. We’re not just interested in them, we’re passionately fanatical about helping them succeed. That’s our purpose. It’s why we exist. It’s what we love doing.
It’s time to talk about what small business really is. Throughout the year, I’ll be writing about the definition of small business in a series of blog posts and articles, all based on our research at Infusionsoft. Everything I’ll be writing about will revolve around The Definition of Small Business: Eight Stages of Success.
My intent with The Eight Stages of Small Business Success is to create a common language in the industry that will ultimately help small businesses get what they need in order to succeed (and avoid the stuff they don’t need). I realize it’s an ambitious goal. And maybe I have no business trying to set the standards. On the other hand, nobody else is doing it. This is going to be fun.
