By Veronika Sipeeva and Katherine Reed
Image credit: iStock
Last spring, our team reported on the challenges VSB (very small business) owners face as they manage their personal vs. work (and sometimes also school) personas and accounts during a typical day. This gave us a good foundational understanding of these customers’ needs. We have been working on compiling VSB owners’ jobs to be done and building an understanding of their world. While jobs to be done provides a great framework for understanding tasks, real life is naturally a bit more complicated.
So, with our most recent round of research, our goal was to gain deeper understanding of this group and spend much more time listening than talking, spurring their comments with open-ended questions. In meeting with this group of customers, our conversations naturally gravitated towards how passionate they are about their work, growing their business, and giving back to their community. We employed Indi Young’s deep listening technique and as we proceeded, we started to see distinct patterns.
Although these customers do take on the various roles that we’ve come to expect from small business owners, some are also looking more broadly beyond their businesses at how they can help their community and/or enact social change. We also noticed that some VSB owners are more pragmatic and focused on things like keeping their business running, staying open, improving systems and processes, and getting paid for services.
Pragmatists vs. dreamers
This led us to characterize our very small business owners as pragmatists or dreamers. Let’s look more in depth at who these people are and what these designations mean:
- The pragmatist business owner starts a business because it’s a way to have a career where they are in control. They don’t identify as life-long entrepreneurs. Instead, some were overworked, dissatisfied in their role, and wanting something different. Others had a hobby that slowly grew into something full-time or saw an opportunity happen by chance.
- The dreamer tends to identify as a life-long entrepreneur and often grew up around family business(es). For dreamers, their business idea is their passion. It represents not just being the boss, but more importantly pursuing the dream.
Serving the needs of both sub-segments of the VSB space requires understanding of their motivations. The dreamer wants technology to take care of the mundane, operational tasks that are required to run a business, so they can focus on their passion. The pragmatist needs technology to help them make money, automate cold calling, and increase sales. They aren’t living their dream by starting a business; they are trying to pay rent or looking for efficiencies to help grow their business.
Of course, it’s not completely an either-or dichotomy. Pragmatists need to have some vision to be successful and to get others on board, and dreamers need to be practical to keep their business running. Therefore, any single VSB owner embodies some mixture of pragmatist and dreamer.
Contributing to community
VSB owners often consider their employees as family (in addition to often having family members involved in the business). They tend to be very thoughtful about who they hire and then have a focus on employee retention. We heard about how they want to have a positive and empowering culture for their employees. Technology can help by providing centralized resources, as well as ways for employees to connect with each other.
Employees are an immediate concern, particularly considering the staffing shortages that are being widely experienced across business sizes and industries. However, we also heard the word “community” frequently. Contrary to the prevailing myth about small business owners being focused only on survival and growth, these VSB owners also prioritized helping their community. This could take many forms, such as helping others in underserved segments to be successful or helping their city, county, or regional community. It could mean enacting social change, such as encouraging more diversity in a historically non-diverse industry, addressing racial inequality, and/or solving systemic problems. These goals are sometimes related to the industry in which their business operates, or can be unrelated; the underlying theme, however, is “how am I going to change the world?”
We are interested in exploring these topics further to understand how technology can help with the human connections that VSB owners are trying to make. We’d also like to examine how we can support VSBs in their day-to-day work so they’re free to think big about changing the world.
What do you think? If you are a small business owner, how does this map to your experience and goals? Tweet us your thoughts @MicrosoftRI on Twitter or join the conversation on Facebook.
With thanks to Kent Lowry who was a major contributor to our VSB research as a whole, and to this study in particular. Check out his past blog post on the power of silence.
Katherine Reed is a design researcher on the Microsoft Admin Design & Research team, with a focus on modernizing Office updates. Previously, she managed a customer advisory panel of small business owners for the Office Planning & Research team. She joined Microsoft after graduating with a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology and Journalism from Duke University.
Veronika Sipeeva is a design researcher on the Office Planning & Research team at Microsoft, focusing on the small business space. Previously, she led research projects at a Pacific Northwest health insurance company, Premera Blue Cross, where she helped establish and champion research practices, mentored and equipped teams with tools and methods for improving customer experience. Veronika holds a master’s degree in Human Centered Design and Engineering from the University of Washington, serves on the HCDE Alumni Leadership board and is a co-chair for the volunteer committee for the UXPA International Conference. She is passionate about helping others discover the value of research and strongly believes that the best work often comes out from including diverse perspectives and partnering with others.