Why Lack Of Digital Skills Is Hurting Small Businesses Future

The taxi industry is in major free fall, and who can even name a local hardware store? The fact of the matter is that small businesses are getting crushed on many fronts across the United States and the major fortune 1000 companies are dominating the economy. Almost every major stock is up heavily since 2009. Even the so called digital startups require massive funding to reach sustainability like Facebook, Twitter, Uber, and many of these other massive new disruptive companies. Small business sentiment has been at lows since the crash of 2009 and does not seem to be recovering to pre recession levels.


Technology is massively disrupting almost every industry. Banks need mobile apps, taxis need mobile apps, retailers need eCommerce websites, distributors need eCommerce websites, manufacturers need eCommerce websites, and service businesses need to make their services accessible via the web. Even smaller hosting companies are potentially going to get eaten up by the likes of Amazon Web Services and other cloud behemoths.
To execute such digital prowess in an effective way that enhances or helps a business succeed is both expensive and extremely difficult. That is why even large companies struggle with this. So how could a small company have any hope of doing this well?
The answer starts with education. Small business owners and small business managers need to invest in digital knowledge, whether it is understanding their core CMS software like WordPress, having basic HTML / CSS skills, basic SEO skills or any other digital skills that will help them grow their business.
The fact of the matter is that businesses cannot rely entirely on third party digital agencies to succeed and must have some level of autonomy from a digital perspective, whether it is writing quality blog posts, social media management, Google Adwords management, or some other form of digital savviness.

What you can do?:

So rather than writing a blog about how small businesses that have little to no digital skills are screwed, I am suggesting small businesses follow some of these things.

Invest in technologies with a bright future:

This is where most companies stumble. How do you determine this? Look at several simple things:
Market Share: Is the technology a large part of the market. Something with small market share wont have much adoption and will lack integrations or third parties that can assist with such a technology.
Company fit: Is the the technology geared towards manufactures, distributors, retailers, etc… Is it meant for small business owners or fortune 500 companies? Make sure the technology is a good fit for your industry and type of company.
TCO: What is the cost of ownership of this technology? How much does it cost to hire an expert to manage it for you. How much maintenance goes into keeping it up to date? Many businesses think WordPress is free but the cost of maintaining is certainly not free because you have to update the core software and plugins on a consistent basis.
Growth: At one point Volusion had a lot of market share in the eCommerce space but has been declining for some time now. Make sure the technology you choose is growing in market share and not declining.
Good Examples:

Hire digitally inclined people:

This is critical if you want to succeed in today’s increasingly digital world. Hiring the right people is key to success and if you can find ones that have digital savviness there is a good chance they can help push you in the right direction from a digital perspective.
One of the mistakes we made was simply trusting people too much in their digital claims, make sure to test people thoroughly with hard problems or questions, especially if you are looking for very specific skills like web development or some other technical skill.

Hire multiple third party technical consultants:

Often times a company will simply make a decision based on non expert opinion. If you are not an expert and need to make a major decision like what technology to use to build your website or how much to spend on your website, hire a third party expert for advice. Don’t just get one person’s opinion either, multiple opinions that you can compare are often much more powerful because you may realize the bias of each opinion and why they are really making that suggestion.

Learn – its free!

There have never been more free tools and ways to learn digital skills for free than there are today. Start by googling what you want to learn and chances are there are free tutorials, videos, and much more. There are also a ton of resources out there teaching you how to use software like WordPress, how to code, and much more.