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Posts by Charles Laughlin

June 25, 2019

Are Late Payments Killing Small Business?

A new study in Australia showing how late payments are hindering small-business growth is just the latest in a series of studies underscoring how cash flow remains a major challenge for SMBs and a leading cause of business failure.  The reality of the struggle small businesses face with getting paid on time combined with their…

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June 24, 2019

The Yawning Chasm Between All-in-One Demand and Adoption

LSA’s proprietary small-business survey data consistently tells us SMBs would prefer one software provider to handle most or all of their business operations. They choose this over picking and choosing among point solutions for payments, payroll, marketing automation, CRM and so on. In the new LSA Modern Commerce Monitor™️ (the successor study to the Tech…

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June 19, 2019

Stripe, Xero Partner to Get SMBs Paid Faster

Two of the biggest global brands in SMB fintech have joined forces to solve a common pain point for small businesses — getting their money on time. SaaS accounting giant Xero and payments platform Stipe announced a partnership at the recent Xerocon San Diego conference for the two companies to develop tools to help small…

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June 13, 2019

Drive to Simplify SMB Experience Behind Location3 Platform

Last week at the LOCALOGY ENGAGE event near Washington DC much of the discussion centered around building marketing and back office SaaS products for small businesses that are simpler and more transparent in order to improve engagement, which is a great bulwark against churn. We learned from the new Modern Commerce Monitor™ (which is replacing…

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June 12, 2019

LOCALOGY ENGAGE 19: What Drives Engagement?

Most SMB software products offer customers improved efficiency and time savings. But the upfront investment in learning and training is a big ask for busy SMBs. One of the key threads in the latest wave of LSA’s SMB survey research, now called the Modern Commerce Monitor™, is that small business owners are underutilizing SaaS products,…

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June 12, 2019

LOCALOGY ENGAGE 19: Market Outlook – Rollups and Exits

Last week’s LOCALOGY ENGAGE: SaaS/SMB event finished off with a conversation about the environment for acquisitions and rollups featuring a panel experienced in evaluating and acquiring small business software companies. The panelists were well situated to evaluate the SMB software environment. Sarah Jordan is CMO of EverCommerce, a Denver-based company formed out of PaySimple that…

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June 11, 2019

H&R Block Jumps into SaaS with Wave Financial Acquisition

The convergence of traditional and cloud account continued today with H&R Block’s C$537 million ($US405 million) acquisition of Wave, a Toronto-based SMB-focused cloud accounting software company with an estimated 400,000 customers and annual revenues of C$50 million ($US38 million). At last week’s LOCALOGY:ENGAGE conference in Washington DC, a panel of investment bankers and strategic buyers noted…

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June 11, 2019

LSA Forecast19: Is the SMB World Moving from SaaS to SaaT?

The Local Search Association presented its 2019 forecast for the small business software industry at this week’s LOCALOGY ENGAGE: SaaS/SMB conference that suggests the future will be less about software as a service (SaaS) and more about software as a transaction (SaaT). We took the position that small businesses will increasingly prefer to pay for…

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June 6, 2019

LOCALOGY ENGAGE 19: What Do Your Small-Business Customers Want?

Small businesses are moving their operations steadily into the cloud, they are seeing real benefits from doing so, and yet they are substantially underutilizing the capabilities of the software they’ve purchased. At this week’s LOCALOGY ENGAGE: SaaS/SMB event, I unveiled our new Modern Commerce Monitor™ (formerly Tech Adoption Index) SMB survey data using this three-part…

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February 27, 2019

#LSA19: Demystifying the All-in-One Solution — Selling the Full Stack

Today at LSA 19 we had a breakout focused on how to sell full stack software solutions – those digital equivalents of a Swiss Army knife. The full stack concept makes a lot of sense, at least on paper. Why not make it easy for SMBs to run their business in the cloud with one…

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