Wavell Cowan, Dean of the SSBP

Lets face it. What people have in mind when they talk about the business world isn’t the kind of small businesses we run. They mean public corporations. Which isn’t us.

That’s also what every business school is all about. Providing plenty of useful information to people planning to climb the management ladder of large corporations. Information, by the way, that’s largely useless for us. The kind of small businesses we run are a different species and need a very different educational upbringing. Unfortunately, that’s not what’s made available to us by the alphabet soup of government and non-profit small business educational providers. Which you may already have found out.

It’s the same thing with banks and the whole financial system. Angel investors won’t look at us because we aren’t planning to “go public”. Ditto for venture capitalists. Banks mostly won’t look at us either, unless we jump through all the hoops and get tax-payer money to support us via an SBA loan guarantee. A pretty sad state of affairs, don’t you think? But take heart, interesting things are happening..

New technologies are continuously destroying economies of size, by providing small businesses like ours with more and more tools that can slash our costs and broaden our markets, making us ever more competitive. And you know what? The big guys that you think can wipe you out any time they wish – without those economies of size – are proving to be amazingly inefficient and wasteful when compared to us. And it’s because of their size, so they can’t do much about it. Now there’s a huge advantage for us to exploit!

So the direction in which the economy is moving will increasingly favor the success of our kind of businesses. What’s essential now is to create a “small business” private sector infrastructure, as an alternative to the current business infrastructure so exclusively directed to support the success of large businesses. Our mission at the School of Small Business Practice is to help create such an infrastructure.

We have developed the educational offerings perfectly aligned with what running our kind of small businesses is all about, (available on-line at low cost) to provide the training needed by small businesses to become ever more competitive in this new environment. We’ve introduced some powerful ideas about small business collaboratives as a necessary feature of future small business success. We’ve come up with an approach for developing a whole new class of small business private investors and the means by which they can be successfully connected to our kind of small business community. These are the components of the small business infrastructure that together we can actually build.

In short, the blueprint for a small business infrastructure now exists. So ENTER our school and find out exactly how you can benefit both immediately and in the long run by making a $10 annual investment to become an associate of the school. Exciting times are ahead. Join with us. Help make the blueprint a reality. Help reshape the future. And by all means, spread the word.