When we started Magic Desk, we felt very strongly about being able to support SMBs. This passion for driving value to this business segment was rooted in a couple (and other) core beliefs of ours:
- SMBs are the business segment most likely to need help when it comes to managing IT professionally. When you’re an SMB, deciding where to invest resources is such that you’re ultimately forced to decide which areas of the business are most “worthy”. IT in particular tends to be the land most forgotten, with SMBs often times electing to manage themselves at the cost of time, expertise, and risk. Speaking of expertise specifically, IT is often single biggest gap for the SMB space — if for no other reason than most weren’t built to be IT-driven businesses. Lawyers want to practice law. Finance professionals want to practice finance. The list goes on and on.
- SMBs and entrepreneurship is the lifeblood of the American economy. We live this ourselves, so it’s a part of the fiber that drives Magic Desk internally. It’s the American Dream, the path to financial freedom for many, and small businesses employ countless others for their own livelihood. There are few causes (in our humble opinion) that we’d be more proud to support.
There are countless ways to “classify” a business as an SMB vs. mid-market company vs. enterprise; revenue band, employee headcount, etc. etc. For us — largely because of what we do, how it’s delivered, and our pricing model — employee headcount is the core metric defining an SMB.
In our mission to support SMBs, we had originally set the lower end of the employee band at 5. At the time, it felt right. But looking back we now know…
We missed something 😣
Why? Well, we were choosing to artificially “disqualify” an entire swath of SMBs in those solopreneur up to 4 person businesses. Solopreneurs in and of themselves contribute $1.3T to the US economy. There’s 41.8 million Americans who identify as consultants, freelancers, or solopreneurs — a number that continues to grow.
But, we’ve changed our tune. We credit a good friend of the company for helping us see the light. Around New Years Day, we received a call from this friend and it went a little something like this:
“Hey Magic Desk team, Happy New Year! I’ve got some exciting news, as I’m going off on my own and launching a company. Right now, it’s only me — and truthfully, it’s likely to be just me for the immediate future. I know that you work with companies with at least 5 employees, but I’m challenging you to figure it out for me. Fact is, I want to be sure things are set up properly in terms of technology and data security from the outset, and I need to know that I have the tools and team behind me to do so. Your move…”
We got off the call, met amongst ourselves, and came to the realization that this was not only a worthy challenge to undertake in helping a friend, but it illuminated an otherwise massive blind spot in our thinking. Size of the solopreneur market opportunity aside, these are folks whose businesses are representative of the same types of “SMBs” we were already working with. Their needs, concerns, and the value that we could deliver to them was effectively identical to the 5, 10, 20, and 50+ person businesses we were already working with in many respects.
Knowing this, we immediately got to work.
We’ve now designed and deployed a solution that effectively mirrors what those 5+ person SMBs are getting, but made it exclusively for solopreneurs. And despite this post (likely) being the first time anyone outside of our walls is hearing about it, we’ve already onboarded two new solopreneur clients.
Best part? They’re ecstatic and — just like with our other clients — we’ll continue to deliver on the promise that we’ll handle IT so that they can deliver on the promise of their business to their clients.
We’ve got more resources to come your way, so sit tight solopreneurs.
But if you don’t want to wait, we can’t wait to meet you either.
Drop us a note: hello@magicdesk.io
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