It is bad enough that the big banks are screwing small businesses by totally ignoring their need for capital. Must the SBA aid in the screw job by providing irrelevant and outdated training materials to those wanting to hone their small business skills.
photo credit: ShashiBellamkonda
Yesterday. I was looking for a marketing text to pass along to a client and decided to go up on the SBA website to see what they were referencing. I went to www.sba.gov and in the search box typed in “marketing documents” and it returned the following page:
http://search.sba.gov/gcse/searchresults.html?cx=012149749304426494285%3Avl4bn0plkpq&cof=FORID%3A11&ie=UTF-8&q=marketing+documents&sa.x=30&sa.y=5#1060
where I chose to review the following three documents on page 1 of the extensive listing:
MARKETING STRATEGIES FOR THE GROWING BUSINESS
MARKETING FOR SMALL BUSINESS: AN OVERVIEW – SBA Homepage
BUSINESS PLAN FOR THE SMALL CONSTRUCTION FIRM
The first text was copyright 1991 and has not been revised since. It makes no mention of the Internet or Internet marketing and obviously social media marketing and wireless were not around then
I also quickly looked at the Business Plan for the small Construction Firm and the following paragraph just leads me to believe that this document was also written in the 1980’s.
Describe your market area in terms of customer profile (age, education, income, etc.) and geography. A customer profile will help you focus your advertising to reach your potential customers. For example, if you are a custom builder, you may decide to build homes in the $100,000-$250,000 price range. This would mean that your customers will have incomes in the middle-to upper-middle-class ranges. You may also decide you can earn a profit by building these homes within a radius of 30 miles from your office. In the space below describe your market.
Lastly, I tried the MARKETING FOR SMALL BUSINESS:AN OVERVIEW and in the reference to the Bureau of Census on page 5, everything points to data collected in the 1980’s.
How can a small business person trust the training materials on the SBA web site when they are over twenty years out of date.? How out of touch is the government? How is small business supposed to succeed when the materials put out by the government are antiquated and therefore irrelevant.
It is bad enough that the banks are screwing small businesses. We do not need the SBA to help in the process by their failure to stay in touch with the materials they are using to provide training for these businesses that are generating a huge chunk of the economy and are providing a large number of needed jobs.