The Under-Served Market
The small business market is chronically under-served by the consulting industry. Most consulting companies have overhead that drives up their fees, so they naturally seek out clients with deep enough pockets to afford them. Small business clients are just not on most consulting companies' radar screens.
Yet small businesses can reap huge returns on well-conceived systems and software applications. These returns are sometimes directly quantifiable in financial terms. More often, the benefit comes in saved time. I find that most small businesses do not think of time as money.
In my first small business engagement in 1979, I wrote a small program to speed the creation of invoices. The outcome was far different than the expected savings of clerical time – the program's calculations corrected errors the clerks had been making and saved the company $10,000 in the first year. My fee: less than $1,000.
15 years later, I developed a "run-the-business" application for that same client. The software automated the order entry and invoicing process with a highly customized program that reflected the business owner's style. In this case the owner saved 18 hours per week of his personal time. He used that time to expand his business. The financial value of that improvement has never been quantified, but it is tangible.
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