We are about ready to embark on The Small Business Tour with companies like Constant Contact, Cisco, Microsoft, Concur and Intuit in Seattle, Las Angeles, Houston, Boston and Raleigh/Durham – all in the hopes of educating small business owners and the advisors who serve them about the new way of running a small business with all the available information, technology and techniques. We’ve dubbed it Small Business 3.0.
Aside from this catchy slogan, what Small Business 3.0 means is actually what Corelytics (the dashboard and company) is all about – focus on making better business decisions with superior information that you don’t have to work harder to get!
We want the users of our financial dashboard and our partners who rely on market intelligence we provide them to be able to do this. But first, we are trying to model the behavior we are asking our customers and partners to take up.
Like all businesses out there we are using various types of technology to help know whether what we’re doing is moving our business and customers forward or not. Let me share with you who we use. (These are not recommendations, but what we use today):
- Where are our revenues of product and service going? Yes, we use our own product, Corelytics, to track out financial performance and share these pictures with our team to show them how we’re progressing against our financial goals.
- Is our marketing having impact, do we get more of the right kind of customers because of it? We are using products like Google Analytics and Constant Contactto track how our marketing efforts are performing.
- What can we do to provide better support to our customers and partners – what are the top problems can we help resolve faster? In conjunction with other tools, Salesforce.Comis providing us with a powerful CRM.
- Are we managing expenses so we don’t over spend with the cash we have available to operate? Since there are several team members that are on the road, we use Concur Breeze to organize our process around tracking and reporting on our expenses.
- How can I make sure that my team members understand where we want the company to go and who is it that owns specific initiatives that are going to help us get there? We are working on a very powerful management capability in Corelytics that is going to help solve this business management problem. Stay tuned!
Our hypothesis: 90% of the small businesses around the world are dealing with the same things we are – spending more time collecting data from various locations than analyzing what it’s telling them.
Corelytics is now helping small businesses in 24 different industries across 34 countries (and growing daily!) to see a better picture of their financial performance. We hope to do more for a growing list of our customers in the future.
There are a ton of dashboards out there that enable business owners to collect information from all over – this only gets you part of the way there because then you have to configure them or pay someone else to. What we know is most small businesses give up at this point because it is too complex and too costly and never get to fully understand how what is happening in their business impacts their financial performance.
Whether you are a small business or a partner of ours, we are working to make it easier for you to access the intelligence to improve how you manage the various aspects of your company to make smarter decisions about how you improve it.
Come join us in our crusade!