ABCtech #162 29FEB16 Business Growth Agencies Must go Digital

ABCtech #162 29FEB16 Business Growth Agencies Must go Digital

Business Growth Agencies Must go Digital

Organisations involved in growing small business communities must embrace on-line strategies to cost effectively reach and support their Small Business Communities.

This is as much to do with the economies of making a meaningful and measurable impact as the overwhelming trend of small business to use “search engines” for the first level of advice. If business growth agencies don’t go digital they will become irrelevant.

Cost structures of one to one advice do not work if you are trying to support a volume of small businesses. For example the US SBA support network of 2000 centres (SCORE,SBDC, WIB VIB) reaches only 4% of the 22 million SME’s, and they are not sure if they are the right ones. There is also never enough time to make a difference.

Business itself is finding new ways of obtaining advice. New generations demand mobile 24/7 instant advice using “search” to leverage the largest library of resources the world has ever known. Their problem is that they don’t know what questions to ask and what internet advice to trust.

Herein lies a clue to the future role of Business Support Agencies. Instead of providing answers, perhaps the focus should be on providing the right questions and pathways to the right internet advice and all the people connected to it.

“Future Support Agencies will have to go digital in everything they do” says Ray Bowman the SBDC Director who is leading the LA SBDC network towards the digital agency. As one example Ray is building an export community using www.virtualinternationaladvisor.com to enable new skills and capabilities.

“Virtual advice does not obsolete the professional advisor” Ray adds. “Rather it enables richer returns. We can service more clients and then focus our scarce advisor resource on the highest potential clients.”

Lyn Hay, Chairperson of Business Innovation and Incubation Australia (BIIA) adds a further dimension. “It’s also about the data” she says. “If you can capture the interactions with business you can develop a community data base of health, fitness and support needs. You can work on the community as well as in it, providing programs to strengthen the community as a whole.”

Facing a business world going digital, Growth Agencies have little option but to disrupt their own paradigms and adopt on-line services. If they do they can extend their reach and their relevancy to the business community and to those that fund them.