The Hurdles to SMB Success: understanding the Pain points
Although we’ve had recent hyper-advancement in technologies, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, there are still the following two major problems:
1. A multitude of synergy disconnects exist between small businesses (SMBs) stakeholders and AI technologies. In the last year, AI adoption worldwide has jumped from 50% to 72% per a McKinsey & Company Survey[i]. However, AI is by no means perfect and there is still much to be improved.
2. The AI trust gap[ii]. Can it be trusted when it matters most?
This presents us with a once in a generation opportunity to firmly bridge the gap. The result would be enormous amounts of time and money saved for the SMB community, more competition, and a considerable strengthening of our economy.
To further illustrate the opportunity, there are approximately 33.185 million SMBs in the United States.[iii] As of 2023, small businesses “employ almost half (46%) of America’s private sector workforce and represent 43.5% of gross domestic product.”[iv] There is no denying the SMB community represents a substantial portion of our economic muscle. Yet, the rate of failure within the community is of stark contrast. “According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), approximately 20% of new businesses fail during the first two years of being open, 45% during the first five years, and 65% during the first 10 years. Only 25% of new businesses make it to 15 years or more.”[v],[vi] Imagine where we could be as a nation if these statistics were more promising.
After 20 years of experience in small business and 15 years in financial services we have learned that most small business owners fail due to the following key opportunities:
The Business acumen needed to succeed has a steep and long learning curve: Very few SMB stakeholders have a natural ability to manage, control, and grow all the facets and challenges that come with running a business. It often takes many years to develop the skills needed to succeed. Often it takes a team to scale. This can translate into years of wasted time and resources, and often puts an entire business endeavor into question. Sometimes the juice simply isn’t worth the squeeze.
Internal factors and information: SMB stakeholders often overlook critical growth opportunities that are made available through the following available core functions and data from their own business:
1. Organizational business functions.
2. Operational business functions.
3. Connectivity between these functions.
4. Data created between these functions.
External factors and information:
1. Too much information is available online and thus veils access to the most relevant or most needed information (knowingly or not) when it is most needed. Even with modern search engines and artificial intelligence, SMB stakeholders often drown in oceans of information, noise, and data.
2. Economic and market trends are always changing at an incredibly fast pace. If you don’t know where to look or don’t have the right tools, it can be incredibly difficult to keep up.
why Does this happen?
Primary shortcomings:
1. Lack of Time: As mentioned above, SMB stakeholders often get dragged down by the business challenges they are least experienced with. Rather they should be focused on driving revenue or other key areas of the business that they are better at managing. To illustrate, accounting and finance are often seen as highly complicated and challenging to SMB stakeholders. Many just don’t have the mental or physical bandwidth to take on the critical tasks that come from finance and accounting functions.
2. Lack of experience: Often translates into paralysis by analysis.
3. Depth and complexity of information: If you don’t know where to look and how to process the information, it can often become incredibly overwhelming and difficult to prioritize.
Secondary shortcomings:
1. Inefficient and ineffective internal connectivity leads to unreliable data.
2. Poor performance: If all business functions aren’t all managed at an optimum level, there is an increase in risk of one or more functions faltering and hindering the businesses’ ability to perform. An organization is as strong as its weakest link.
3. Limited access to financial resources due to poor performance: a consequence that makes it even more difficult to grow. You need financial resources (for example, access to capital) in order to grow, but you need verifiable growth and stable financials to be able to unlock access to financial resources. The chicken or the egg.
innovative solutions: Tailored automation for SMB Excellence
What if we could use supervised machine learning to tackle these issues? What if we could provide SMB stakeholders with centralized technology that operates as a liaison with every core facet and resource of their business? We work with our clients to accomplish the following:
1. Add organization and clarity to our clients through various core deliverables.
2. Automate business components that can truly benefit and further create positive change for the organization.
3. Implement artificial intelligence that manages connectivity and relevant data across key organizational and operational business components.
4. Implement artificial intelligence that manages connectivity and provides data that is made available between the above business components and all service providers used by the SMB.
5. Implement AI that speaks with internal and external AI, unbiased and not married to any one source. The sole purpose of this AI will be to, given specific parameters, evaluate relevance and obtain data from major verified data sources.
6. Implement supervised machine learning that evaluates and summarizes all relevant internal information, evaluates and summarizes all relevant external information, and applies tailored and risk adjusted predictions in line with business goals and objectives.
7. Provide hyper intelligent automation solutions over which we help our clients to always remain in control.
Unlock Your Business Potential: Let’s Explore the Possibilities Together
What makes what we provide so valuable is the opportunity to gain complete control over the most demanding data-driven challenges of our clients’ businesses and provide clear, summarized, reliable, risk-adjusted, tailored, actionable insights. We help our client SMB stakeholders to save enormous amounts of time and money; thus enabling them to truly scale, succeed, create wealth faster, and win back time. Many will argue that time won back has been the most important win. It is true that AI can research and compute much faster than humans however, we believe “AI should augment human intelligence, not replace it.”[vii] We have an opportunity and responsibility to create powerful, controllable centralized solutions for our clients. Solutions that are unbiased and that only provide our clients with timely, valuable insights. As we work to build a better future for our clients, we are also helping to bridge the issue of trust with AI much faster. We are fostering exponential positive change in the SMB community and are helping to advance human potential.
REFERENCES:
i. Singla, A., Sukharevsky, A., Yee, L., Chui, M., & Hall, B. (2024, May 30). The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value [Editorial]. Quantum Black AI by McKinsey & Company. Retrieved June 17, 2024, from https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai
ii. Chakravorti, B. (2024, May 03). AI’s trust problem: Twelve persistent risks of AI that are driving skepticism. [White paper]. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved June 17, 2024, from https://hbr.org/2024/05/ais-trust-problem
iii. What’s new with small business: Frequently asked questions about small business 2023 [Fact sheet]. (2024, June 14). U.S. Small Business Administration: Office of Advocacy. Retrieved June 17, 2024, from https://advocacy.sba.gov/2023/03/07/frequently-asked-questions-about-small-business-2023/#:~:text=There%20are%2033%2C185%2C550%20small%20businesses,net%20jobs%20created%20since%201995.
iv. The State of Small Business Now [Fact sheet]. (2023, April 10). U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Retrieved June 17, 2024, from https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/state-of-small-business-now
v. Deane, M. T. (2024, June 1). Top 6 Reasons New Businesses Fail. Investopedia. https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1010/top-6-reasons-new-businesses-fail.aspx#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20U.S.%20Bureau,to%2015%20years%20or%20more.
vi. Survival of private sector establishments by opening year. (2023, March 31). U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved June 17, 2024, from https://www.bls.gov/bdm/us_age_naics_00_table7.txt
vii. De Cremer, D., & Kasparov, G. (2021, March 18). AI Should Augment Human Intelligence, Not Replace It [White paper]. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved June 17, 2024, from https://hbr.org/2021/03/ai-should-augment-human-intelligence-not-replace-it?utm_medium=paidsearch&utm_source=google&utm_campaign=domcontent_bussoc&utm_term=Non-Brand&tpcc=domcontent_bussoc&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwmrqzBhAoEiwAXVpgolB1vAu9S-KBI5hhHWYEqEAAN79mCmAQMOMHaqcmz-2vtwfl_C36VBoCTS0QAvD_BwE
