We’ve wanted to get Bill Furlong on our Above the Cloud podcast for a while. His new book, “Appify Your Business,” is well-aligned with the data-driven viewpoint we’ve developed at the Local Search Association with the Modern Commerce Monitor™️ (formerly Tech Adoption Index).
In fact, the tagline of his book, “Harness the power of Apps to save 10 hours a week and reinvent your business” is about as good a statement of our thesis as I could ever come up with.
So it’s no surprise that the book cites LSA’s data liberally (with our permission of course) to help make the case that, in Bill’s words, “If small businesses don’t adopt the cloud, they’re toast.”
When Bill isn’t writing primers on cloud adoption for small businesses, he is CEO of SquareStack, a Chicago-based SaaS startup that offers a “command center” that helps SMBs aggregate all of their business apps into a single login, and a single view of the critical data flowing out of the apps — like account balances, status of invoices, open rates for email campaigns, and so on.
The Five Best Quotes from Our Conversation with Bill Furlong
- “I feel that If a small business doesn’t adopt the cloud, they’re toast.”
- “There is a cataclysmic generational transition going on now, with sons and daughters taking over businesses and moving them off of pen and paper.”
- “The core issues for small businesses is finding the time to take advantage of [the software] they have already paid for.”
- “Once CRM is introduced into the small business, a tipping point occurs where they realize they need to spend more time with their technology.”
- “It is hard to convince a small business owner to go to one supplier for everything. It is just as difficult for them to disengage from one software provider as it is onboard onto a new provider.”
Check out the full episode here for the full context for these comments and more:
This episode of Above the Cloud is sponsored by Mono Solutions.
Mono Solutions delivers the ultimate SaaS-based digital marketing platform for small businesses across the digital landscape to drive business online. As a fully-white label solution, Mono empowers digital service providers with a true do-it-with-me (DIWM) approach to offer digital marketing solutions and deliver real ROI to their SMB clients.
