Yesterday I went to the NEAA show, it’s a regional industry show for the payments industry. One of the panels focused on small businesses.

Based on estimates reported, their are either 24 Million or 30 Million entities (LLC’s / S Corp / C Corp) in the US that make less than $100,000 a year. Let’s assume some are tax shelters and take only the 13 Million who have payment processing accounts. The question that kept ringing in my head was…

How can a small business get the support and expertise it needs to grow with such a small budget?

Whether it’s marketing, sales, legal, accounting… anything really it is challenging to get the help needed to grow, without taking resources of the vendor since that unprofitable client could become detrimental to the service provider and cause a negative impact on 2 businesses.

This is further exacerbated by the reality that according to data, the average business owner is 50.5 years old and 35% are not comfortable with technology, the ultimate lever to allow time to scale.

Answering this is the antithesis of the only serve very large clients, will certainly be the way many companies win, look at Intuit and Quickbooks, they have high eighty percent of the market in accounting, not by only focusing on large business.

Have you thought about who your perfect customer is and what lines (revenue / staff / software use / etc) that you won’t cross?