Or even worse the lose of all senses.
This is going to bring me some un-targeted traffic from people searching for the Conference for Blind Entrepreneurs, but no, I’m not going to talk about blind business owners.
I would really like to write some thoughts about a “disease” that hits most of the small businesses: incapacity to react to a lot of market inputs – and therefore missing opportunities.
I will start by giving a simple example: Romania (as most of the countries) sustains a program to help SMBs develop exports. I’m not going to give you a link as most of the Romanian official sites are poorly written in English, and also that’s not the point. Anyway, as soon as the program was launched, they had some problems because the huge number of requests from SMB’s. Right, the thing is that I have applied (for the company I was working for) to this program about 4 years ago, and I got a non-refundable grant. And back then, nobody knew about this program.
Going back 4 years ago, there were very few companies knowing about these grants. And God knows how many opportunities they and we have missed since then. It seems that small businesses in particular are blind in spotting free opportunities. We are missing funds, we are missing trainings, we are missing conferences and customers.
I don’t have any out of the box ideas to help cure the “blindness”. But how many of you are using the resources offered by the local chamber of commerce? How many of you read “business” newspapers if they are not exactly related to your business field? How many of you use a business development consultant to get most of the market?
I think I’ve hit a hot spot. I’m not doing these things either. Too bad for me and welcome to the blind club.
I work with my local chamber and I know of no FREE grants in my local – tenino, WA USA?
david