One on One Interviews

Over the past year and a half or so BizSugar.com, a sister site to Small Business Trends, has gone through a bit of a transformation. The site is dedicated helping small businesses understand how they can use integrated platforms and automated processes to grow and scale their businesses. Part of that effort was to create a mastermind community for sharing ideas, experiences and expertise. And in that relatively short amount of time, the BizSugar mastermind community has grown to over 18,000+ members.

I’m chair of the BizSugar advisory board and one of the activities we did earlier this year was a survey to better understand the current challenges facing small businesses. This took place before the Covid-19 pandemic hit the country. And earlier this week a few members of the advisory board participated in a livestream conversation discussing some of the main takeaways from the survey of 585 small businesses folks. We also offer up a few solutions that may be able to help you address some of the major challenges small businesses are faced with.

Covid-19 has stretched the American healthcare system to its limits, and beyond. And things are changing in real-time in order to deal with a pandemic that has already cost more than 87,000 people their lives in a span of just over two months. And technology is at the heart of that change as IoT and mixed reality devices are enabling telemedicine to dramatically increase, and the manufacture of ventilators to ramp up to produce numbers in months that typically take several years to push out.

Microsoft has been involved in developing IoT and mixed reality technologies for years. And during a recent LinkedIn Live conversation with Rodney Clark, VP of IoT Devices and Mixed Reality for Microsoft, I had a chance to learn how these technologies are being used during the pandemic to help the healthcare system meet the needs of patients and caregivers fighting the virus. Rodney also gives us a glimpse of how IoT and mixed reality devices will change other industries well after the pandemic is over.

We found out today 20.5 million jobs were lost in April due to the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. And many of those jobs were people working at one of the nation’s 30 million plus small businesses. And, according to a recently released report by the SMB Group, Impact of COVID-19 on SMBs: Navigating a Path Forward, 43% of small businesses temporarily shut down due to the shelter-in-place orders many states put in place in response to the deadly outbreak.

But possibly the biggest unknown going forward might be just how many of those businesses will be able to open back up again, which SMB Group co-founder Laurie McCabe and I discussed earlier this week during a LinkedIn Live conversation. Laurie shares some of the key findings from the study, including how some small businesses are turning to certain technologies to help them not only survive, but also thrive even during the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.

Meredith Schmidt, Salesforce EVP & GM for Essentials and SMB, recently joined me for a LinkedIn Live conversation to share how Salesforce is helping small businesses in these difficult times, what she’s hearing directly from small businesses during the pandemic, the importance of using technology in more creative ways to stay connected with customers, and the role Salesforce is looking to play to help small businesses to not only survive Covid-19 but position themselves to succeed once we get past the crisis.

With Congress passing a new $480 billion round of funding, including $310 billion for PPP, banks are about to get deluged with new submissions from small businesses in dire need of money to help them survive the economic shutdown caused by Covid-19 pandemic. And the crush of submissions during the first round of PPP funding brought many of the banks to a standstill as much of the processing of those applications were done manually.

In response to the current situation, Pegasystems - a leading platform provider for digital process automation, and business process management and CRM - developed the Crisis Small Business Lending app. The service is designed to help their banking customers speed up the PPP submission responses by automating different parts of the process. And earlier this week I had a chance to learn more about how automation could significantly speed up the PPP process by speaking with Marc Andrews, Vice President, Financial Services and Insurance Industry Market Leader for Pega.

Earlier this week I had the opportunity to do a LinkedIn Live conversation with Gary Specter, Vice President of Global Commercial Business at Adobe, to learn more about the program, and to hear his thoughts on how SMBs can better position themselves for what will likely end up being a much different business environment and set of customer expectations once the country opens back up for business.

The early days of applying for the the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) has been tough, as millions of small businesses are trying to take advantage of the opportunity to get the funding they need to right out the economic shutdown due to the coronavirus pandemic. But the good news is some of those first to submit their applications are beginning to get their approval notifications back. In fact during this week’s convo with Corpnet CEO and frequent Small Business Trends contributor Nellie Akalp, as she was sharing the details of both the PPP and Economic Injury Disaster Relief Program(ECIDRP) opportunities, a small business friend of mine sent me a message saying he had just been approved. And as he was sharing the process he went through, Nellie got her approval notification.

So those early to apply for the program are beginning to hear back. But if you haven’t submitted your application you’ll probably want to get it in as soon as you can. And Nellie did a great job laying out the program, who’s eligible for it, and what you need to have ready before you apply. So if you want to learn more about these programs, below is an edited transcript of a portion of our conversation. But to see the whole conversation and hear all of Nellie’s tips and advice surrounding these programs watch the video or click on the embedded SoundCloud player below.

Having sat in on a million Zoom meetings, Skype meetings and Webex webinars, the mashme platform, called The Room of the Future, was a real eye opener to me. It was a more immersive experience which had you feeling like you were actually in the classroom. So, with more and more of us doing more work from home and online collaboration, I spoke with mashme CEO Victor Sanchez to hear more about universities are using this immersive experience to deliver a more collaborative digital learning environments, and how that may transfer into business environments.

John Taschek came to Salesforce coming up on 17 years ago and built what many feel is the model for analyst relations in the CRM industry. What’s ironic is he did that while not viewing it as being analyst relations, and while not following the industry practice of focusing solely on the big name firms like Gartner and Forrester. In fact, based on his past experiences as a tech media exec, he wanted to find the right voices to listen to regardless of whether they had a big brand after their name, and treated those he found the same way he treated those who did come from a big brand firm.

So we spent a few minutes with John (at the last conference I attended before the pandemic) learning more about why he decided to build the program the way he did, the role Marc Benioff played in letting him be “a CEO of one”, and why it was important to him to not limit his search for voices to the usual suspects; and to treat those other voices the same way as those coming from the big brands.

Last year I had a great conversation on what digital transformation means for small businesses with Joe Galvin, chief research officer for Vistage, a peer mentoring membership organization for CEOs, business owners and executives of small- to mid-size businesses with more than 22,000 members in 20 countries.

Vistage recently published a report based on a survey of their membership on how the coronavirus pandemic is effecting their confidence and impacting their business. So I was glad to spend a few minutes with Joe hear more about what he’s hearing from the Vistage community about how they’re operating during the pandemic, and how this experience may change the way they operate once we get past this trying time.