Rodent Regatta

John Patrick has a very nice web site and weblog. He’s got deep experience with the kinds of customers that IBM has served for many years. An (overly) simple view of that customer set is global company, many sites, multiple currencies, tens or hundreds of thousands of employees and usually public companies. John surprises a group of CIO’s with the term ”blogging.”

At the other end of the spectrum are small, private, closely-held businesses with fewer than 30 employees. ”Good enough” has become the technology management creed for too many of these businesses.

They are giving up on innovation. They find lots of excuses – not reasons – for their stances. ”Too expensive; no benefits; we don’t need it; we have people who do that; we already have two computers, why do we need a network?”

These are not your up-and-coming businesses. Some of these are businesses that have fed multiple generations of a family and continue to do so. Growth is not measured. Profit is what goes home with the owner at Christmas time.

Somewhere between those two is a sweet spot for small solution providers. I’m talking about businesses with 20 to 500 employees with an eye toward growing, becoming more profitable, doing things quicker for customers and reducing the waste and errors in their operations.

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to list ways that companies meeting this last profile can be identified. How do you find them?