Jenn Allen believes most tech companies are getting it wrong when selling to “cloud native” small businesses. And getting it right is important, given we’re looking at a pretty rapid transition from older to younger business owners in the coming years as Baby Boomers set to hit retirement age at a 10,000 per day clip…
About a year and a half ago we developed a set of six principles that served as the foundation for what would become the Tech Adoption Index. These principles were the reasons we believed the small business shift to the cloud would become the biggest game changer since SMBs started building websites and shifting their media spend…
Last week WeWork acquired digital marketing firm Conductor. After it happened I got a number of informal messages like: WeWork + conductor, make sense? Many people were surprised by the move, and from a distance it’s initially confusing potentially. WeWork rents office space; Conductor manages digital marketing and SEO for enterprises. These two functions seem relatively distant from…
Cloud-based technology, software as a service (SaaS) and other digital platforms are revolutionizing how businesses big and small manage everything from HR and payroll to marketing and supply chain. As these technologies “flow downstream” and become more affordable/available, small businesses are beginning to adopt these technologies. The 2017 Tech Adoption Index Survey revealed that roughly…
To help small businesses with the hiring process, Facebook announced its “Jobs” tool connected with Facebook Pages roughly a year ago in the U.S. and Canada. This week, the company announced an expansion of the program to over 40 countries, allowing small businesses all over the world to post job openings and job seekers to…
An article in the Philadelphia Inquirer in some ways states the obvious when its says that Millennials and teens are rapidly moving away from cash and in the direction of payment apps like Venmo and CashApp. The article underscores a few key principals driving the Local Search Association’s Tech Adoption Index program, which is measuring the small business shift…
A new forecast from technology research firm IDC, projects that SMB IT spending will hit $600 billion in 2018 and reach nearly $700 billion by 2021 – growing at nearly 5% a year. According to the press release announcing the forecast, IDC divides the SMB market into two buckets: mid-sized and small. Mid-sized businesses (with employee size ranging from 101-999) will spend more than $400…
New data from the National Federation of Independent Businesses (NFIB) suggests small and medium sized businesses are optimistic about the state of the business climate. One key challenge SMBs face is finding qualified and skilled employees and with a tight labor market this is unlikely to change. Keep reading on TechAdoptionIndex.com….
Zoho is something of a anomaly in the cloud software space. Privately held, India-based Zoho has never raised a dime of outside money and it competes with some of the giants of the cloud, think Salesforce, Google, GoDaddy, etc. So how does Zoho break through and set itself apart? Part of the answer comes from Zoho’s embrace of the “business…
Funny how the world evolves. Years ago when I was helping the team at The Kelsey Group, we used to talk and write about how the big box stores were destroying Main Street U.S.A. We debated and discussed how that disruption would impact the local media business. The thesis was that as Main Street’s Mom and Pop…