Tag: business

Squandering a reprieve

How did media companies miss the opportunities of the tech wreck?

ABC Radio National’s Background Briefing has a terrific story on the struggles of the Fairfax newspaper empire during the early days of the Internet.

One of the major themes that jumps out is how Fairfax, like many media and retail organisations, squandered the opportunity presented by the tech wreck.

The tech wreck was an opportunity for incumbents to claim their spaces in the online world, instead they saw the failure of many of the dot com boom’s over-hyped online businesses as vindication of their view the Internet was all hype.

As former Sydney Morning Herald editor Peter Fray said “In florid moments you could even think this internet webby thing would go away”.

For Fairfax the profits from the traditional print based business were compelling. According to Greg Hywood the current CEO, for every dollar earned by the company, 70c were profits – a profit margin of 233%.

The Internet threatened those “rivers of gold” and media companies, understandably, did nothing to jeopardise those returns.

Another problem for Fairfax was the massive investment in digital printing presses in the 1990s. These behemoths revolutionised the way newspapers were printed as pages could be laid out on computer screens and sent directly from the newsroom to the press itself which printed out pages in glorious colour rather than with smudgy black and white images.

Moreover these machines were fantastic for printing glossy coloured supplements and the advertising revenue from those high end inserts kept the dollars rolling in.

When the tech wreck happened, the massive investments in printing presses were vindicated as the rivers of gold continued to flow while the smart Internet kids went broke.

Fairfax’s management weren’t alone in this hubris – most media companies around the world made the same missteps while retail companies continued to build stores catering for the last echos of the 20th Century consumer boom.

In 2008, the hubris caught up with the retailers and newspapers. As the great credit boom came to an end, the wheels fell off the established business models and the cost of not experimenting with online models is costing them dearly.

Value still lies in those mastheads though as more people are reading Fairfax’s publications than ever before.

Readers still want to read these publications, one loyal reader is quoted in the story that Sydney Morning Herald should aspire to “being a serious international paper.”

That isn’t going to happen while management is focused on cutting costs to their core business instead of focusing on new revenue streams.

Somebody will find that model, had the incumbent retail and media organisations explored and invested in online businesses a decade ago they may well have found that secret sauce.

Now many of them won’t survive with their horse and buggy ways of doing business.

Shifting to a better return

Will rewarding passionate workers solve American business’ poor return on assets.

As part of Deloitte’s Building the Lucky Country series, the consulting firm had a briefing last week from John Hagel, co-chairman of Deloitte’s Silicon Valley Centre for the Edge, to discuss how industries are responding to shifts in the workplace and their markets.

John’s thesis is that businesses can be broadly split into into three groups; infrastructure, product innovation and customer relationship business which he covers in his Shift Index that looks at how industries are being affected by digital technologies.

Infrastructure businesses are high volume, transactional services like call centres, logistics and utilities companies.

The product innovators are those who develop new products, get them to market quickly and accelerating adoption of those goods.

Customer relationship businesses focus on understanding their clients and using that knowledge to add value.

Each of these business models require different mindsets and because most large companies try to do all three, they manage to do none well.

One of the results of this is a lousy Return On Assets, which Hagel says have fallen in the United States to one-third of the levels of 1965 and he doesn’t see this improving as the ‘competitive intensity’ of US markets increases.

A big feature of this decline in overall ROA is how the best performers have travelled compared to the laggards with the ‘winners’ barely maintaining their returns while the ‘losers’ are seeing their results declining dramatically.

How Hagel sees the solution to this poor performance is through rewarding creative and passionate workers better.

Firms have untapped opportunities to reverse their declining performance by embracing pull. To accomplish this, firms must develop and encourage passionate workers at every level of the organization.

Additionally, companies must tap into knowledge flows and expand the use of powerful tools, such as social software to solve operational/product problems more efficiently and effectively as well as to discover emerging opportunities.

If Hagel is right, it’s the businesses who want to micro-manage their workers while stifling innovation, initiative and creativity in their businesses who will be the great losers in this next decade as we move to the next phase of the ‘Big Shift’ where knowledge flows improve business performance.

Starting the process of dealing with these shifts involves understand what the DNA of your business really is; if it is a transactional infrastructure business then management needs to acknowledge this and not kid itself about being in customer relationships.

There are weakness in John Hagel’s proposition – one being that businesses can be easily pigeonholed into three categories.

Apple is a good example of this where a company that is clearly product focused has also shown it can be customer orientated with the success of the Apple Stores.

There’s also the question of why are there only three categories? In the breakdown the immediate thought is that there are businesses that don’t fit in any of these boxes. Legacy airlines or struggling motor manufacturers are good examples.

Despite the criticism, John and the Center For The Edge have some good points about the future of business and it’s something we’ll explore more over the next few weeks.

Today’s business Neanderthals

Many businesses are hopelessly ill-equipped to deal with today’s realities and are doomed to extinction

“Bringing a knife to a gunfight” describes showing up hopelessly ill-equipped for the task at hand.

Two recent conferences, the massive Dreamforce in San Francisco and the smaller, but still fascinating, Australian Xerocon in Melbourne illustrate just how radically the commercial world is changing and how many business leaders are poorly equipped for today’s times.

In July, the Melbourne Xero Convention bought together 400 Australian partners of the cloud accounting service which showed how how one New Zealand based company is building it’s business through engaging other suppliers who add features to the basic service.

Vend, a Point Of Sale cloud service provider, was one of the companies exhibiting at XeroCon. In the past POS systems have been a pain for retail businesses with most suppliers’ business models being about locking customers into expensive contracts.

With cloud services, the old vendor lock in model dies as stores can use any device they like such as a PC, tablet computer or a smartphone so a business is no longer locked into using an overpriced and often antiquated piece of equipment.

Making the cloud offering even more attractive is that Vend, and many of their competitors, also take advantage of APIs – Application Program Interfaces – built into other services so they can seamlessly change records.

So a shop can make a sale in their physical store and inventory levels will automatically change in the online stores and on services like eBay. If an item is now of stock, the websites are automatically updated to reflect this.

This business automation makes it easier and cheaper to run a business. It’s everything that computer have promised for the last thirty years and is now being delivered through cloud computing services.

At Dreamforce in San Francisco last week, Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff showed the 90,000 attendees how these services work on a corporate level with demonstrations from companies as diverse as General Electric, ski company Rossignol, and Australia’s own Commonwealth Bank.

What really stood out with all of these presentations was how each business had made major technology investments that in turn allowed them to deploy modern tools.

The Virgin America Dreamforce presentation was particularly telling. Having just endured a 13 hour United Airlines flight in a plane that had been barely refurbished since 1988 it was clear that the older airline simply didn’t have the hardware to compete with the upstart even if management and staff wanted to.

From both Dreamforce and XeroCon the message has been clear, those legacy managers who won’t invest in new technologies or re-organise their businesses to meet the realities of the 21st Century are simply doomed.

In Australia this sense of doom in the business community is confirmed when MYOB and Google missed their target of giving away 50,000 free business websites as part of their Getting Aussie Business Online program.

Depending on whose figures you use, between 50 and 65 percent of Australia’s 1.7 million small businesses don’t have a website – and websites are last decade’s technology.

Business has moved onto mobile and social platforms, those 800,000 businesses who are yet to move into the new century are roadkill – the competition are just going to run over them.

If you are still struggling with the idea of a website – let alone a mobile site, mobile phone app or social media strategy – then you haven’t bought a knife to a gunfight, you’ve bought a sharpened stick. It’s time to figure out whether you still want to be in business.

Disclaimer: Paul travelled to XeroCon in Melbourne courtesy of Xero and to Dreamforce in San Francisco as a guest of Salesforce.com

Will write, play and cook your dinner for free

Playing for love is different to working for free.

From the Internets;

Craigslist Ad:
We are a small & casual restaurant in downtown Vancouver and we are looking for solo musicians to play in our restaurant to promote their work and sell their CD. This is not a daily job, but only for special events which will eventually turn into a nightly event if we get positive response. More Jazz, Rock, & smooth type music, around the world and mixed cultural music. Are you interested to promote your work? Please reply back ASAP.

A Musician’s Reply:
Happy new year! I am a musician with a big house looking for a restauranteur to come to my house to promote his/her restaurant by making dinner for me and my friends. This is not a daily job, but only for special events which will eventually turn into a nightly event if we get a positive response. More fine dining & exotic meals and mixed Ethnic Fusion cuisine. Are you interested to promote your restaurant? Please reply back ASAP.

Shamelessly lifted from the Telecaster Guitar Forum via Bob Lefsetz’s blog.

The discussion about Amanda Palmer offering unpaid gigs for local musos on her US tour has been heated and the perspectives are interesting.

What’s missed is the difference between artist and workers – the local violin player or trombonist getting up on stage with Amanda Palmer in Poughkeepsie isn’t going onstage to make a buck, it’s because he or she loves playing and is honoured to get an opportunity to perform with a big act.

On the other hand, one of the sites that’s been critical of Palmer advertised for a “insightful, knowledgeable and talented writers to contribute to the ongoing and ever-intriguing discourse on music and film.”

For submitting three 200 word blog posts a day, the lucky writer will receive a grand payment of six dollars. That’s one cent a word. Plus a cut of advertising revenue.

Should anyone be tempted to think that revenue could amount to much, they should keep in mind the web is awash with crap content that’s worth one cent a word; there’s no reason why any half decent writer couldn’t set up their own blog and stick adwords on it for a better return.

A few decades ago when printing was expensive and distribution networks difficult to set up, indy magazines offering little but an outlet to their writers served a purpose.

Today you can setup an outlet in five minutes on Blogger or WordPress and let the web do the distribution for you.

Any business that relies on free or cheap content is doomed – we’re in a world awash with cheap, crappy content and the public don’t see much reason to pay for it.

That there is no market for crap is something our once esteemed newspapers, magazines and TV stations should keep in mind as they sack subeditors, retrench journalists and increasingly source material that was available on Twitter a day earlier.

There’s a big difference between a musician or blogger creating something for love versus a business ripping contributors off  – one needs a market to succeed, while the other just does it because they want to.

Google tries to drive American business online

Can Google convince reluctant American businesses to move online?

Google’s quest to sign the world’s businesses up to websites stepped into the big time this week with the launch of America, Get Your Business Online.

The US program is based upon the Getting British Business Online program which was followed up with similar projects in Australia and then Texas prior to being launched nationally across the States.

An interesting aspect with the rollout of the various programs has been Google’s choice of partners — in Britain the key supporter was the incumbent telecommunication company BT.

For some reason the subsequent programs have chosen to partner with accounting software companies and small business groups. The US program is no exception.

These partnerships are interesting as the software companies involved are threatened by online cloud services — both Intuit and MYOB have their business models of selling boxed software to small businesses under siege.

While Google regularly cite the Boston Consulting Group’s survey on the importance of websites to business, it seems most small operators don’t care as about half of small businesses don’t care about an online presence most developed countries.

In Australia, the Getting Aussie Business Online fell short of its 50,000 sign up target which indicates smaller enterprises still don’t see the point.

They may be right — for the local locksmith or lawn mowing service a Google Places account may be all they need rather than a relatively high maintenance website.

Part of the problem is that small business proprietors are probably the most time poor people on the planet, so  filling in another set of forms is one of the last things they will do.

Were Google to link Google + for Business to their other services so information wasn’t being duplicated there would be a far quicker and greater take up of their services.

America, Get Your Business Online should be a useful service for some local enterprises but the real challenge for Google is to integrate their services to make it easier for smaller operations to use.

Owning the customer

Is it possible to own the customer?

During the tech boom of the late 1990s the early wave of web developers had a business model that required locking customers into a relationship.

Having spent thousands of dollars for designing and building a website, a business then found they would have to spend hundreds of dollars every time they wanted to make even a minor change.

While that model didn’t work out for web designers as new tools appeared that made it easy for customers to look after their own sites, it’s still the ambition of many businesses to ‘own’ as much of the customer as possible.

Department store credit cards, supermarket petrol cards and airline frequent flier programs are all examples of how big businesses try to lock their customers into their ecosystem.

Possibly the dumbest, and most counterproductive all, are the media companies with policies of not linking outside their own websites. The idea is to keep readers on their sites but in reality it damages their own credibility and betrays their lack of understanding how the web works.

The airlines too have discovered the risks in trying to ‘own’ their customers as their devaluing frequent flier programs has irritated and disillusioned their most loyal clients.

Many businesses, particularly banks and telcos, try to tie you up into knots of contractual obligations with reams of terms and conditions. All of this is an attempt to make the customer a slave to their business.

Outside of having a legally protected monopoly, you can’t ‘own’ a customer – the customer has to grant the favour of doing business with them.

They’ll only do business with you if they trust that you’ll do the right thing by your promises; whether it’s delivering the cheapest product, the best service or quickest delivery. The moment their trust begins to slip, you risk losing their business.

Executives who talk of the concept of owning the customer are either working in organisations with little competition or those steeped in 1980s management practices. If you hear them talking like that, it might be best to take your business, and investments, elsewhere.

Owning customers didn’t work for the web designers of the early 2000s and it won’t work for businesses in other sectors. The only way to ensure most of your clients keep coming back is to deliver on what you’ve promised them.

A world of criminal sheep

Are we are all criminally inclined sheep that need to fleeced and controlled?

Notorious unpaid blogger Michael Arrington recently described his battle with a bank over direct debit charges.

To overcome a fraudulent recurring charge on his credit card, Arrington cancelled his account only to find the bank moved the recurring charges to the new card, a ‘service’ designed to avoid fraud and save customers the hassle of re-establishing legitimate direct debits after a new card is issued.

Both of those are noble reasons but the core of this philosophy lies in a contempt for customers which can be summarised in two principles.

A customer is;

  1. A sheep to shorn of any available cash through sneaky fees and shady business practices
  2. A criminal

In the 1980s business school view of the world, customers are criminally inclined sheep who have to be regularly shorn to enhance profits and controlled so they don’t go anywhere else.

Only businesses operating in protected environments can get away with this today and the two obvious sectors are banking and telecommunications.

The telco industry long soiled its nest with consumers with dodgy charges and a contempt for customers which reached a peak (nadir?) with the ring tone scams where kids had their phone credits pillaged by fees they never knew they had signed up for.

While those dodgy charges paid the handsome bonuses of telco executives, it proved to another generation of consumers that these companies see their customers as sheep to fleeced on a regular basis.

Ironically it’s that lack of trust that dooms the telcos in the battle to control the online payment markets – their practices of the 1980s, 90s and early 2000s mean few merchants or consumers will trust them as payment gateways.

One of the strengths banks bring to that market is trust. Like cheques, credit cards succeeded as a payment mechanism because people could trust them.

In screwing customers over direct debit authorisations, the banks are damaging that trust as Arrington says “I really don’t think I’m going to be giving out my credit card so freely in the future.”

That’s a problem for businesses as direct debiting customers have been a good way to ensure cash flow and reduce bad debts but when clients perceive there is a high risk of being ripped off they will stop using them.

Businesses that insist on direct debits will be perceived as potentially dodgy operators who rely on locking customers into unfair contracts rather than providing a decent service for a fair price.

So the banks’ position of legal power works in their short term interest and against them – and the merchants using their services – in the longer term.

While bank and telco executives with safe, government guaranteed market positions will continue to treat customers like criminal sheep it’s something the rest of us can’t get away with.

The winners in the new economy are those who deserve to be trusted by their customers and users, if you’re abusing your market and legal powers then you better hope politicians and judges can protect your management bonuses.

Selling old rope

Sometimes rebranding an old concept works in the favour of customers.

“Big Data is a fad” announced a speaker at a technology conference. “We’ve had Big Data for years. We used to call it business analytics.”

He’s right. The IT industry is very good at rebadging technology and the term ‘Big Data’ is just the latest of many examples — the best of which is how ‘cloud computing’ which is largely a rebadging of SaaS, Application Service Providers or client-server.

While it’s easy to be cynical about this IT industry habit, there is a valid underlying point to this repainting old rope — that the refurbished old string is cheaper and more useful than what came before it.

The problem for innovators creating accessible, cheaper and faster ways to do things is they risk that their product will be likened to the old, expensive and inaccessible methods. No cloud computing provider wants to be associated with IBM’s expensive client-server products or the flaky Application Service Provider of the dot com era.

Most innovations aren’t revolutionary, they have evolved out of an older way of doing things. So saying “it’s being done before” when seeing an innovative product may be missing the point.

In the case of Big Data the principles aren’t new but we’re collecting more data than ever before and the old tools — even if they could manage with the volume of information— are far more expensive than the new services.

So repainting old rope isn’t always done for purely marketing purposes, sometimes there’s a real benefit to the customers.

Fleeing the group buying market

The air deflates from the group buying bubble

As Apple becomes the highest capitalised stock in US market history, former daily deals site and market darling Groupon continues to sink into misery.

Groupon led the group buying mania of 2011 and its stock market float in November of that year valued the business at 13 billion dollars, ten months later the business has a capitalisation of three billion, wiping out three quarters of its IPO shareholders’ investment.

To make matters worse for the daily deals site the New York Times features a story looking at deal fatigue, where customers tire of the daily emails offering discounted cafe meals or personal training while businesses find the deals just aren’t worth the trouble.

“I pretty much had to take a loan out to cover the loss, or we would have probably had to close,” the Times quotes Dyer Price, owner of Muddy’s Coffehouse in Portland, Oregon. “We will never, ever do it again”

In a straw poll, the Times correspondent visited neighbouring businesses who had similar stories.

The common factor with all the business horror stories surrounding group buying or deal of the day sites is high pressure sales tactics that blind the merchant to the downsides of these offers.

For these services, it’s essential to move through as many deals as possible so salespeople are driven to sign up as many merchants as possible. When you put pressure on sales teams, they tend to behave in ways that aren’t always good for customers.

Most of the customers Groupon attracts – or those of other deal of the day sites – are price sensitive and fussy. Having demanded their deal, most of these customers are not coming back so it may well be that daily deals are the most expensive, disruptive and pointless marketing channel ever invented.

The results of the high pressure tactics are shown in a Venture Beat story which claims Groupon is now threatening to sue unhappy merchants as payments slow and the daily deals struggle to attract customers.

What was always misunderstood during the group buying mania was that Deal Of The Day sites weren’t really technology plays – they were reliant on good sales teams driving deals. The technology being used was incidental to the core business concept.

In this respect, services like Groupon had more in common with the Yellow Pages or multi-level marketing schemes. It was about salespeople delivering orders and taking a percentage off the top.  To compare Groupon with Google, Facebook or any tech start up was really missing the point.

This isn’t to say that group buying or deals of the day services don’t have a role in business. For retailers clearing inventory, hotels working around quiet periods or new businesses wanting to get attention in a crowded marketplace, there’s an argument for offering a deal on one of these sites.

For most though it was an expensive and pointless exercise that attracted the picky, price sensitive customers that most business would avoid rather than encourage. That’s the harsh lesson learned by many of the businesses who fell Groupon’s fast talking salesteams.

Stranded markets

Businesses with old, declining markets are going to slowly fade away

“Stranded assets” are an accounting term for property that’s worth more on the books than it is in the marketplace.

Often the valuation problem has come about because of market, legislative or physical changes – what was a valuable and useful asset becomes isolated from the rest of a business.

Customers are biggest asset we have in our business – so what happens if our customer base becomes a “stranded asset”?

This situation isn’t far-fetched in a time when technology changes a marketplace – a blacksmith providing services to stagecoach companies would have been in this situation a hundred years ago.

In response to Are Businesses Fleeing the Online Space?, Xero’s Australian CEO Chris Ridd made some points about the problems MYOB have in the accounting software marketplace.

We see that going online to the cloud is finally allowing many small businesses the opportunity to avoid the “walk into Harvey Norman and fork out hundreds of up-front dollars on on-premise software” experience and instead go straight to the simplicity and cost efficacy of the cloud.

This is evidenced in our numbers and the fact that 40% of new customers signing up to Xero are coming from no software. (I mentioned last week at the NBN Forum that it was 30%, but we doubled checked and were staggered to find it was actually a lot higher). So we are creating a new market and cloud is therefore increasing the addressable market for accounting software. The cloud changes the economics of doing IT and makes automation of the business accessible and attractive to  a whole new category of SMEs.

Chris’ point is interesting – the new generation of businesses aren’t going to the computer superstore and buying box software. Which is a problem for those who sell box software such as MYOB and Harvey Norman.

What’s more, customers have moved away from those same superstores along with things like phone directories and classified ads, which is the problem companies like Sensis and Fairfax have to deal with.

A decade or so ago, MYOB, Sensis and Fairfax were dominant in their markets with a loyal band of customers. Today the remaining customers – many of whom have not changed their business plans for decades – are”stranded markets” made up of holdouts who won’t move to new technologies.

Those holdouts aren’t particularly profitable and they are slowly leaving their industries through retirement or, increasingly for these slow adopters, going broke.

Being dominant in a market that’s declining in both profits and sales is not the place to be for any business.

It’s difficult for the managers of these enterprises to move as their existing products are their core business, which is the classic innovators dilemma, but the alternative is to end up like Kodak or Sony.

One thing missed in the eulogies for Steve Jobs is how he overcame the innovator’s dilemma problem within Apple. When it became apparent the old Mac OS was a barrier to innovation, he killed it along with the floppy disk and Apple Device Bus.

Apple’s customers hated it as most of them had a substantial investment in the hardware which Jobs had made obsolete overnight. But almost all of them came back and became greater fans.

News Corporation are trying a different tack to Steve Jobs in splitting the operation into an “old” business and a “new’ business. That way the old business can find a way to make money or quietly fade away without affecting the newer, more dynamic entertainment and electronic arms of the organisation.

The challenge for MYOB – along with Harvey Norman, Fairfax and Sensis – is to move their customers to the new technologies, those who won’t go are the past and those stranded customers will isolate the business from the mainstream.

Beating the first mover advantage

Not being first to the market doesn’t mean your product is too late.

Twitter founders Biz Stone and Ev Williams can’t be accused of standing still, along with having founded the Blogger service that made creating websites easy which they sold to Google, their company Obvious Corporation has been working on various new projects.

Branch and Medium are their two latest releases.

At first glance Branch is similar to the Quora service where people ask questions and followers. While Quora is reasonably successful, it hasn’t gained traction outside of the tech community.

Medium is a new blogging service, which superficially appears similar to Tumblr or even the Blogger service Ev and Biz founded in 1999.

It’s tempting to dismiss both Branch and Medium as they aren’t doing things that are new. both are iterations of older services but that doesn’t mean they can’t succeed. When Facebook was launched there was plenty of competition in services like Friendster and MySpace, the upstart blew them both away.

The same is true of the iPod, Windows and Google – all entered markets that were already crowded and well catered for. All of them succeeded because they were better than what was on the market.

In the tech industry is that the first mover advantage is illusionary at best, unless you have a compelling position in the marketplace your product is vulnerable to a smarter, slicker upstart. This is particularly true if the existing services have serious flaws.

Should Branch avoid falling into Quora’s trap of silly policies and overzealous administrators – the same trap that doomed the open source directory DMOZ and threatens Wikipedia – then it may well succeed.

Medium could also disrupt the blogging industry, Blogger is being neglected by Google while WordPress is becoming increasingly complex and difficult to use. The success of services like Tumblr, Instagram and Posterous shows people want an easy way to publish their ideas or what they are doing onto the web.

While it’s too early to say if Branch or Medium will be a success remains to be seen, but writing them off as being unoriginal would be a mistake.

Are Aussie Businesses fleeing the online space?

Business confidence is dragging down online engagement according to a new survey.

Every quarter accounting company MYOB releases its Business Monitor surveying the SME sector’s confidence and how they are using technology along, usually these show more businesses moving into e-commerce, setting up websites and adopting social media.

The July 2012 monitor (PDF File) is unusual as it shows a decline in various online business activities, the main areas that slumped were the following;

  • Paying bills on suppliers’ websites: fell from 44% of respondents to 37%
  • Buying products/services online: fell from 37% to 24%
  • Using internet search engines to promote their business: fell from 31% to 24%
  • Conducting email marketing to potential or existing customers: fell from 26% to 24%
  • Accepting online payments from customers: fell from 25% to 19%
  • Using any form of social media for business purposes: fell from 21% to 16%

All of these are a bit odd, particularly the first three, and it may be an errant group in the 1,000 businesses surveyed.

Of the others, email marketing’s fall isn’t surprising as businesses have been finding returns in this field falling for sometime with customers unlikely to open messages unless there is a compelling reason.

Social media isn’t surprising as there’s a feeling of fatigue among business owners confronted with a new hot platform every few months – increasingly it’s getting harder to become enthusiastic about Pinterest or Google+ when existing experiments in Facebook or LinkedIn haven’t really shown results.

Accepting online payments from customers declining really does indicate a hiccup with the surveyed group, with more online payment services than ever available to small business, it doesn’t make sense that this service is declining.

MYOB’s CEO Tim Reed puts the decline down to economic uncertainty saying, “We also found more business operators are experiencing revenue falls than are experiencing rises, and the majority lack confidence in a short term economic recovery. I suspect this has seen many shy away from online activities as they focus on the health of their business.”

If that is the case, then the small business community is in bigger trouble than we thought. Hopefully MYOBs result is just an errant survey result. We’ll be watching to see what the next index shows.