What Exactly Constitutes a Small Business
And if so is there really any practical help for them?
It’s easy to believe that there is, given all the accountants, consultants, software providers claiming to have tailored solutions for them.
Yet on close examination, all the stuff they’re offering seems designed for businesses with 20 or more employees, that have teams and managers to carry out the advice. But how many businesses do you know that have more than 20 employees?
Nationally, 94% of businesses have 9 employees or fewer. These are the ‘microbusinesses’ that nobody actually wants to help and there are 5.6m of them, that’s right, 5,600,000,000!
So the business advice market as it stands is actually focused on the other 6% (300,000). Why’s that?
Because these are the ones able to afford profitable day rate payments for accountants, consultants, lawyers - while the micros get locked out of the good advice that sustains the bigger businesses. There is not (yet) any organised microbusiness support market, but they still manage to spend £10bn pa between them on reactive, one-off emergency days trying to fix things that go wrong, after the event.
So how does the little guy ever get the sustained professional help that makes the difference between hand-to-mouth working and comfortable profits?
And who out there really understands microbusinesses well enough to give them practical advice that works anyway? Like the stuff that fixes everyday problems such as finding more customers, giving a better service, making a better product, getting more productivity from their people, making profits, improving cashflow, selling the business.
These are the things that small business owners are being offered, but never actually receive, because no one knows how, or can afford to give it to them.
So that’s what Runagood® set out to solve in 2010 when government withdrew the only meaningful support that was able to help small businesses perform better.
And we’ve cracked it.
But how to get the message through all the white noise created by the pretenders in the market who have only succeeded in making microbusiness owners cynical through dishonest claims that get hold of their (limited) money and then don’t deliver anything practical. Typical of these is “here’s your business plan all you have to do is implement it.” Or…“Come on our course and you’ll learn how to do it”. Leaving a distraught owner pleading “but I just wanted it fixed, I thought that’s what you would do!”
The answer is that accountant practices can and should step into this yawning gap while it’s there for the taking.
They are capable, trusted and local, only needing consultancy automation and a little training both of which Runagood® provides. And in so doing they will double their revenue from existing clients, find a lot more new clients and build a professional business services practice with a high exit value.
Runagood® automation enables them to profitably handle large numbers of consultancy clients at once who pay prices so affordable that they sustain their subscriptions indefinitely, locking them into the practice.