Small Business Gets Focus (Literally)

A good business owner is always asking questions about areas that affect their businesses, like social marketing, cloud computing, or the luxury market—but that’s not to say they have any answers.

Those at a big firm might say, “Let’s call Forrester Research” or “When can we bring in McKinsey &Co.?” But small-firm operators without the funding needed to call the heavy hitters can be stuck. That was why Focus.com decided to hone in on smaller businesses when it created a model to provide the type of intelligence that is available to the big guys, but which has been both proprietary and pricey in the past.

“Basically, every net new job [during the recovery] has been created by small new businesses, and they’re an incredibly important part of the economy,” says Scott Albro, 41, CEO and founder of Focus.com. “But they’ve had a hard time tapping into data sources, knowledge sources. They just don’t have the abundance of information available to them that the Fortune 500 companies do.”

Since it launched three years ago in San Francisco, Focus.com has provided a free online Q&A forum for its members, connecting them to 5,000 experts in 50 different categories, including business functions such as sales, marketing, IT, and human resources, or vertical industries such as retail or energy. It also offers downloadable research, such as white papers, also gratis.

Focus is not alone in online Q&A land, which has drawn both avid fans and investor dollars in recent years. Similar exchanges occur on StackOverflow, which is for tech types; Quora, which crowd-sources answers on general topics; social-search engine Aardvark, which connects inquiring users to friends and family; and to a degree on LinkedIn. The last company, which launched its IPO Thursday, allows members to interact and share with one another, but Albro says that LinkedIn is far more focused on recruiting and the job market than knowledge gathering.

What distinguishes Focus.com most is the attention to small business, says Albro, and it is moving to separate itself further within that sphere by hosting more online live events to help small-business owners and entrepreneurs in a more immediate format. These webinars and teleconferences will put a face—and a voice—to the folks who are answering questions, providing a more personal experience than you'll find when you simply throw a question out into the online universe.

“We might have an hour-long roundtable where we’ll have four or five experts, and the community can dial in to join,” Albro says. On May 25, there will be a session on opportunities in China for the gas and energy industry, but past talks have included discussions on the recent sale of Skype, Japan's financial crisis, and the NFL lockout. How these events impact small businesses is a key part of the sessions.

Although about 2 percent of the experts are compensated, typically for live events, most of the Focus.com experts are unpaid, and they offer their services to brand themselves and network, Albro says.

While Focus.com's offerings are free, users of the site can't be anonymous. They have to sign up and provide information about who they are, what their industry is, and more in order to register. The site is supported by ads and backed by tier-one venture capital money, with its last round of funding happening about two years ago, although Albro wouldn't disclose from who or how much. The company is not currently going after funding and is projecting bringing in well over $20 million in revenues this year.

The timing is right to amp up the business, Albro says, because as the economy recovers, small businesses are shown to be the ones that are actually adding jobs, and—as the buzz on Focus.com indicates—they are the ones starting to rebuild their teams amid the recovery.

“During 2008 and 2009 and early 2010, we saw the business community concerned with two primary things: weak aggregate demand, or [sales were down],” Albro said. “Concern No. 2 was this general sense of economic uncertainty. What’s interesting is that in the back half of 2010, weak demand started to clear up and people were rebuilding sales and marketing organizations…. What has not improved and has continued to remain a topic is this continued perception of economic uncertainty.”

Focus hopes to allay some of that uncertainty by putting businesspeople—in the smaller operations, that is—more in the know. The big guys are on their own.

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Teresa Novellino writes for Portfolio.com