Presentation and Overview
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SmallBizU
The First Online Academy Created
Especially for Small Businesses and
Entrepreneurs.
Our football team stinks…
But our expertise rocks!
Copyright © 2004 SmallBizU LLC
1.
What is SmallBizU?
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Presentation and Overview
SmallBizU
SmallBizU is…
• SmallBizU is the first online academy created especially
for small businesses and entrepreneurs.
• Currently, it is the largest collection of entrepreneurial
training resources available on the internet.
• We have created a no-frills, utilitarian curriculum that
provides small businesses with real-world tools and
information.
• Inside, you’ll find 20 core classes encompassing over
3,500 animated slides and 350 tools and resources
contained in a comprehensive knowledgebase.
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What’s The Objective of SmallBizU?
• SmallBizU seeks to teach entrepreneurs the 3Ms:
– Money,
– Marketing, and
– Management.
• It achieves this objective through the delivery of 20 core
courses that teach the “language of business” and important
trade-skills.
• Beyond these core functional skills, an advanced master’s
level program titled, The Entrepreneurial Master Class
Curriculum (EMC2) integrates the functional core skills into a
set of “entrepreneurial mindsets” designed specifically for
growing companies.
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Design and Development…
• From its inception, the curriculum of SmallBizU was developed
using a branded and unified approach applied across the
design of every course.
• Each course moves across a continuum of ten sections. The
sections move from a general description of a functional skill,
to the recognized theory, to the application of the practice to a
small business.
• A typical course ranges anywhere from 170 to 230 slides and
is presented over a three to four hour period.
• Each course is delivered via the internet full of animated slides
accompanied by voice-over narration, PowerPoint
presentations, worksheets, toolsets, and access to a
comprehensive knowledgebase.
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Competitive Advantage…
• SmallBizU’s strategic market advantage lies with its
proprietary content and business expertise in marketing
to business development organizations.
• The amount of intellectual property that SmallBizU has
been able to amass over the five-year research and
development phase makes for a formidable barrier to
entry into this market for potential competitors.
• From an economic perspective, it’s less expensive for an
organization to license the content of SmallBizU than
recreate its formidable content base.
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Current Courses…
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Money Courses:
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Finding Money To Start A Business
Creating A Loan Package
Finding and Attracting Investors
Creating Financial Projections
Accounting 101: The Fundamentals
Management Courses:
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Marketing Courses:
–Creating Buzz: Small Business Marketing
–Market Insight and Research
–Positioning
–Pricing Strategy and Tactics
–Understanding Intellectual Property
–Advertising and Promotions
–Marketing 101
Crafting A Business Plan
Strategic Planning and Execution
The Entrepreneurial Strategies
Growing A Business
Choosing A Legal Structure
Buying A Business
Hiring and Managing Employees
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2.
The Problem SmallBizU Solves
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Presentation and Overview
SmallBizU
Product Rationale…
• Most people that start a business are technicians by
trade. They know a skill or craft and seek to build a
business around it.
• But, as Michael Gerber states in his book, The E-Myth,
– “therein lies the fatal fallacy: a technician assumes because they
know the trade or craft that they know how to run a business that
does the technical work.”
• As technicians, they have worked in their business, but
not on it.
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Entrepreneurship is a practice…
• Fortunately, the critical skills of entrepreneurship can be
taught.
• As management pioneer Peter Drucker stated,
– “Entrepreneurship is not magic, it’s not mysterious, and it has
nothing to do with genes. It’s a discipline. And, like any
discipline, it can be learned and improved upon.”
• SmallBizU addresses the need brought forth by both
Gerber and Drucker.
• It provides the necessary skills an entrepreneur needs on
a “just-in-time” basis to allow them to work on their
business rather than just in it.
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There Is A Need For SmallBizU…
• There are over five million businesses in the United
States with less than 20 employees—and you’d better
believe that each and every one of them wants to grow.
• Yet, relatively few entrepreneurs darken the doorways of
our existing educational institutions to get help. Why is
this?
• There are two reasons why traditional community
colleges and universities don’t meet the requirements of
many entrepreneurs:
– (1) they produce the wrong product and
– (2) they deliver it through the wrong approach.
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The Wrong Product…
• The courses delivered by conventional universities are not
designed to solve the kinds of problems that entrepreneurs
actually work on.
• Small businesses, at least entrepreneurial ones, are formed in
order to address problems that big businesses cannot solve.
• If money alone could solve problems, there would be no small
businesses because the big businesses with their abundant
resources would run everything.
• Big businesses and small businesses work on a very different
set of problems using a different set of processes for dealing
with these problems. You cannot just take the processes used
in the management of a large enterprise and graft them onto a
small business expecting to get the job done.
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Problems With Curriculums…
• Much of the content found in the modern curriculums on
entrepreneurship is self-evident: find a gap in the market, be
different, the customer comes first, hire well, and so on.
• Second, much of the advice is diluted from the experience of
big businesses, as if small business is just a flake chipped off
the larger corporate world.
• This is understandable. Universities already had the
curriculum developed for managing a corporation, it was quite
easy to just slap the label “entrepreneurship” onto a stripped
down overview of business management in order to exploit
entrepreneurship’s rising popularity.
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The Wrong Approach…
• Many universities have overshot the typical entrepreneur.
• They offer more functionality than the entrepreneur
needs at a price they don’t want to pay.
• Many entrepreneurs are non-consumers of higher
education and advanced graduate degrees because:
– They might not have the requisite background to get into an MBA
program,
– They have a job they need to get done beyond just “to learn,” or
– They might not have the time to attend an intensive program
delivered in inconvenient, centralized settings.
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A Disruptive Business Model…
• There are a few steps involved in creating a disruptive educational
model for entrepreneurs.
• First, disruptive companies find success in serving students who are
unattractive to the mainstream universities (measured by life
situation, test scores, grades, and so on).
• Second, disruptive educational companies feature unique business
models. They tend not to have campus infrastructures or high-priced
instructors. This difference enables them to be viable at price points
that leading institutions would find unachievable.
• Third, they tend to provide short, special-purpose courses that need
not be knitted together in degree programs, which does not fit
existing universities’ education models.
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The SmallBizU Approach…
• Interestingly, the SmallBizU approach is lower cost, more
convenient, and highly customized, delighting overshot
customers and expanding access to non-consumers.
• SmallBizU’s strategy is to find new ways to reach
entrepreneurs whom universities have historically
overlooked.
• These consumers are delighted with a relatively simple
offering that makes it easier and more affordable to get
done key jobs related to learning specific skills and
solving specific problems—in other words, to grow a
business.
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Branding...
Our cheerleaders are lousy...
Our football team stinks...
Our frat parties are lame...
But when it comes to teaching how to start and grow
a business...we rock!
This branding approach ties back to our rationale that
universities overshoot the needs of some entrepreneurs,
as well as, our relentless focus on entrepreneurship.
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3.
How SmallBizU Works
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Intro Screen
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Flash Plug-in Check
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SmallBizU Main Menu
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Course Catalog
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Course Descriptions
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Course Login
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Presentation and Overview
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4.
What SmallBizU Can Do
For Your Organization
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Presentation and Overview
SmallBizU
Becoming A SmallBizU Affiliate…
• The vision of SmallBizU is not to be a stand-alone portal.
• We understand that the most powerful way to distribute
our content is through a network of affiliates—partner
organizations that share our passion and conviction for
helping people start and grow a business.
• By becoming a SmallBizU Affiliate you will have complete
access to all of our content and the ability to distribute it
in a way that best fits your way of doing business.
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SmallBizU Affiliates…
• SmallBizU was designed from the onset to be “privatelabeled” using an affiliate organization’s logo and
branding assets.
• The entire content of product can be attached to any
website with one single internet hyperlink.
• The affiliate partners themselves are the ones who
ultimately develop a contractual relationship with
SmallBizU—licensing its content on an annual
subscription basis.
• They, in turn, then market the product to their existing
customer base of individual entrepreneurs.
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High Tech—High Touch…
• SmallBizU uses some pretty fancy technology. But don’t fret. We
take care of any technical support issues your clients may
experience.
• Although we’ve taken every measure to ensure a seamless digital
experience, individual computers do vary. But that’s why we are
here.
• No one knows our product better than we do. We take care of the
technology so you can take care of your customer.
• SmallBizU handles all of the on-going back-end operations for our
affiliates including:
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internet hosting,
new product development,
on-going product maintenance and updates, and
all technical support.
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Enhance Existing Programs…
• The courses and curriculum found within SmallBizU can be the
perfect online compliment to your existing training programs
helping you to create new forms of value for your customer.
• Give your customers 24/7 access to these training materials
providing for a new level of service.
• Our Creative Commons Open Source License even gives you
the ability to customize the curriculum to fit your particular
needs.
• In addition, SmallBizU can be a great distance education tool
for rural or geographically dispersed regional programs.
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An Income Generation Tool…
• Use SmallBizU to leverage corporate sponsorships or grant
opportunities by selling “training seats” for local entrepreneurs.
• In fact, we’ve even taken the time to write the proposal for you.
Just use our proposal template, insert your name, your
prospect’s company name, and the sponsorship amount you
are seeking, and then print it.
• Or let your customers foot the bill. Our eCommerce solutions
give you the ability to resell the content in SmallBizU. Let us
take care of the accounting and credit card processing—just
send your customers to your website and collect a check from
us.
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Work Smarter, Not Harder…
• Screen and shape your customer interactions by allowing
SmallBizU to deliver consistent and standardized training
presentations.
• Through this approach, you can move up the value chain
when working with your customers.
• You can even use the content as an internal training
program for developing the skill-sets and talent of your
staff.
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Carve Out A Niche For Yourself…
• Use the content of SmallBizU to differentiate your
organization from the pack.
• Attract new customers and retain the ones you have
through the immediate impact this program can provide.
• Where else can you leverage so much value while
expending so little of your staff’s time and resources?
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Turn-Key Marketing Materials…
• As part of the product
offering, a comprehensive
marketing program has
already been developed
for affiliates including:
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promotional brochures,
“pass-it-on-tools,”
CD-ROM demonstrations,
and even proposal
templates for grant writing
and fundraising (to help pay
for the subscription fees).
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For More Information…
• For A Full Demo:
– http://www.smallbizu.org/sbudemo
• To Print A Brochure:
– http://www.smallbizu.org/cd/brochure.pdf
• For a CD-ROM Product Overview:
– http://www.smallbizu.org/cd
• To Request A Proposal:
– service@smallbizu.org
• By Telephone:
– Toll Free: 800-282-7232
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