Small Businesses

“I basically went through thousands of small businesses over the last five years, and I analyzed all of their pricing. And I found that on average, most businesses are priced anywhere from 30% below or 300% below the price of what they should be selling for.”

“Considering that they employ like two thirds of the workforce in Europe, they create 85% of the new jobs in Europe, and still they don't have this kind of basic infrastructure of external financing to grow and do much more.”

“For a bank to onboard such a customer is just as costly as onboarding a large corporation that's requiring several million.”

“So, so far we've supported a 150,000 small businesses and that's one of our super important KPIs.”

“There are, like, hundreds of thousands of these small businesses that literally, like, do this all by hand.”

“All small businesses at an abstract level, Like have a system of record they need to read and write into. They all have customers in doctor offices. They happen to be patients, but it's interacting and transacting around payments. You need to book appointments…”

“I think the stats are 70% are still paid on paper. And it's going through this massive, like, digitization revolution right now, because federal inflection point, that's regulatory.”

“I actually think one thing I'll go on the record on is I think there's gonna be an explosion in small businesses.”

“And the Eureka moment was that look, this is a supply demand equation. They're just never going to be enough buyers for these businesses.”

“In the smaller businesses sort of like up To a million or two. They're not generally someone who's ready to take on the financial responsibility for running the business. And that's why externally four out of five, three out of five businesses, you know, we ne…”

“I think what we're seeing now, which is really exciting is this explosion of small businesses getting started. And I think that people are going to be able to spend more time on what they're truly passionate about, probably spend more time on things that direc…”

“A lot of people think of AI and they think of cost cutting and they're like, oh, we can really optimize our P and L. We can use AI, automate all these jobs, cut costs. That's not the right lens to look at small businesses. And it's not right for really one rea…”

“32% of these businesses you're seeing, 32% of millions of businesses have a job opening, but they can't find someone who's willing to come and just work hard and show up on time.”

“And we've seen a lot of folks leave Silicon Valley and start new small businesses. So start from scratch using AI and absolutely clean up shop in their towns.”

“The past 25 years, two out of every three jobs have been created from small businesses.”

“I believe that in the next decade, they'll rise to four out of five, five out of six jobs.”

“One thing I'll go on the record on is I think there's going to be an explosion in small businesses. I think AI is actually like an extremely small business enabling technology in particular”

“Well, that's right, on a GDP basis, and about the same amount from an employment rate basis, so small businesses create two out of every three new jobs, so it's incredibly, incredibly powerful economic engine for the country.”

“We looked at our user base and about 50% were small businesses, but the other 50% were these web designers, digital marketers, agencies building websites on behalf of small businesses. And they, like, the data showed us that they were growing faster for us tha…”

“I think there's actually like a million small businesses that are going to change hands because baby boomers are retiring right now.”

“And what I've found in investing in hundreds of businesses now, it's almost always fixable to your point. Almost always. But the reason it won't be is because you don't move fast enough. You don't have people who have been there before around you, and you don'…”

“Thanks to Shopify, we are now, I don't think it's hyperbole to say we're living in an inverted world where the very large retailers are worse off in their e-commerce experience. They have, you know, worse systems and lower converting websites than Small busine…”

“I think we probably made a mistake not thinking about how to bring small businesses into the conversation from the beginning.”

“You increase, you know, from a two and a half percent average tariff to a 15% tariff, that's their profit margin, and it's gone.”

“You would be surprised how many people actually are excited to speak with technologists. Most people outside of Silicon Valley, like small businesses and real, you know, industry and people don't get to speak with technologists often that can build products.”

“If there are 11 small businesses for sale on a street, just picture like houses, one in 11 will sell in any one year period.”

“70 plus million baby boomers own shy of 50% of the small businesses, and a lot of them are retiring and don't have a succession plan.”

“Our guess, well, Nine out of 10 small businesses under charge.”

“The SBA also oversees government contracting. We have to ensure that small businesses get about 23% of federal contracts”

“Most manufacturers, 99% of them are small businesses”

“I think a business that Probably a lot of people should start in the short term, maybe in the next three, like for the next three years that I think would make a lot of money if you know how to run a business is a business that helps other businesses, especial…”

“The way that I think about it for small businesses is I think about it like a rocket. Is going your personal brand should be the sort of side boosters that you use to get the business off the ground. But then once you get it launched out, out, out into space, …”

“There are 34.8 million small businesses in the US. While there are only 30,000 businesses, In the US that are doing at least a hundred million dollars in revenue.”

“And I think this is really more useful to kind of small businesses, which kind of replaces non-usage. Like, there is no support line for a small business. There is no, like, sales line, right? There is no pre-sales line, because they, you know, a small busines…”

“I see, like, the next evolution of private equity being possible where small businesses can leverage technology to basically, like, automate parts of their services organization and then go and use a better business model to acquire other small businesses.”

“Accountants are a big part of the decision Process for small businesses often. And we, if accountants believe in gusto, then that can help their small businesses also believe in us.”

“So if you were targeting small businesses, your average growth rate probably looked around like 12% month over month.”

“My guess is 80% of the small businesses out there are either knowingly or should know that they're breaking some sort of rules.”

“The reality is over a long enough period of time, that index is zero. Like it's really hard. The governance of these things is difficult. Like the norm for most small businesses is entropy is decay. Is dying a slow death and being wound down. Like that's a nor…”

“It's a little bit weird with small businesses because sometimes with small businesses, they need like five years to figure it out and you know how it is. And so. We never really found the one show. What we found was that they just need lots of time to find the…”

“Banking for us is really about, it's one of the, it's the number one next to taxes is the number one thing that, that Small businesses are worried about, like, oh my god, I just did a formation, you know, what kind of filing do I, you know, what kind of format…”

“We're just out of the field with this quarterly poll we do with MetLife. 65% of small businesses said they feel really good about the health of their business. 65%. That same group of people, only 32% of them, felt good about the health of the overall economy.”

“To me, it's a little bit of a myth that they're that different. Their concerns are alike. Worker shortage, wage inflation, supply chain concerns. You know, you hear the geopolitical uncertainty. You hear the same concerns, no matter what the size of the busine…”

“Diluting this product for this person is not going to work. Even if that's the most efficient path, it is not the most effective path.”

“A lot of these businesses, I think if you just started them, you could really wipe the floor with the existing competition.”

“There's going to be some regulation coming out next year where banks are going to be forced to go back and start to lend out to the small businesses, but banks are not equipped to underwrite a small bit.”

“So if you break down our customer set and we have north of 300,000 small businesses on Gusto now, And you look at them sort of by traditional industry segmentation, it's very evenly distributed across a lot of industries.”

“What's exciting about all this technology, you know, that's one example, but there's so many of these kind of different things where just the ease of use and the accessibility opens up what previously was effectively just massive white space, right? It was cus…”

“The fourth is that small businesses are generally a really bad customer base. I think agencies that serve small businesses are the worst type of agency. I think the only companies that do well by serving small businesses are what I would call electricity, mean…”

“Small businesses you know, things that aren't, can't be public company, twenty billion dollar public companies ever are very poorly served by everyone right now because banks won't lend to them. And you know, there's no capital for them and venture capitalists…”

“What you realize is small businesses lend more than they ever borrow, because that invoice that they sent that says net 30, that's essentially a free loan.”

“Until someone figures out how to build an end-to-end sort of ecosystem that changes the disadvantage that an independent has by being independent, I think small businesses, the failure rate will continue to remain high.”

“Very, very India has about sixty million small businesses, about million, million and a half only sell anything online.”

“For most small businesses, so probably everyone listening, you generally don't get a revenue multiple. There's a lot of misinformation out there around valuations, but revenue multiples are uncommon. You generally get a multiple of profit.”

“Small businesses don't stay small on purpose. There's a reason why they stayed small. And usually there's some lids on the business that we're able to release over, over time that help the business grow.”

“So I would say a good boring business is 15 to 50, 15 to 50% margins. 50 would be like really good. 15 would be like, okay, we've got a healthy business within lots of characteristics. One to three is awful.”

“I'd probably wait another six or 12 months and see what goes down. I'd like to spend a bunch of time learning about this stuff that I think is going to be super impacted. So for me, it would be like, I would learn deal making. I would learn to buy boring busin…”

“At business apps, we in our, you know, values, like you were saying, we said we serve small businesses, so we never built like enterprise functionality.”

“In between for these small businesses, because they're typically sold at like three times, you know, three to five times income.”

“And in 10 years from now, I think we're going to see probably 10 X the number of small businesses as there are today.”