Selling to Small Businesses

Steve King points out a new website with free research capabilities. The Edward Lowe Foundation launched YourEconomy.org. It’s a free research website that allows users to examine and use small business data. The data comes from the Nets database, which is based on D&B data. Although not all of the YourEconomy.org site is yet functional, [...]

The U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy is once again doing something that has a laudable purpose. We’ll see if this time around it results in broader applicability to small businesses — and not just limited to a small handful of special interests. The program is called the R3 program (the “Small Business Regulatory [...]

In the typical growth path of a small business, certain functions, like information technology, end up getting handled part-time by the owner as the business grows.  How do you convince the business owner that it’s time to bring in professionals and upgrade equipment and software?  Many business owners don’t have the technology background to know what they may be [...]

I am surprised — amazed even — at how quickly businesses of all sizes are jumping on board Twitter.com.  The uptake has accelerated in the past 6 months. Twitter has been around for 2 years, but I believe interest by businesses has grown much faster in Twitter than it did in blogs, MySpace, Facebook or any other social media I can [...]

One of the ways companies are developing loyalty among entrepreneurs and small businesses is to get to them early on — before they’ve established loyalties elsewhere. And make no mistake about it, entrepreneurs are getting younger and younger these days. Youth entrepreneurship initiatives are a growth area today. A new report, “Youth Entrepreneurship Education in [...]

Here’s another piece of advice for you bankers — and for any business with retail outlets serving small businesses.   The advice?  “Get in the mindset of making it easy on small business startups.” Last week I wrote about key features that startup small businesses want from their banks.  Then this past weekend I happened upon an article written [...]