Successful Startup 101 Magazine - Issue 6
Page 17
*** Editor’s Note: this article originally appeared at Entrepreneur
Neat’s Chris Barbier Talks about the Future of Small Business Solutions
Companies that specialize in small business solutions have managed to carve out a very lucrative market niche for themselves and one of the frontrunners in the quest for innovation in this burgeoning industry is Neat. Billing itself as “one ecosystem for all your important information”, Neat offers customers ways to transform documents currently in paper or digital format into a more organized and streamlined collection that is easily accessible, searchable, and sharable. Neat’s Vice President of Project Marketing, Chris Barbier, has been an integral part of the company’s success and has helped put the right business solution products into the hands of the small business owners who need them the most.
It is easy to mistake Neat’s expansive product line as a just a consumer product like any other geared toward small business. But this industry-leading enterprise is actually a critical element of what is considered by many to be the backbone of the American economy – small businesses. Startups and “sole-preneurs” – small businesses with one or two employees – make up roughly 70 percent of Neat’s customer base and the owners of these companies have found that Neat’s products have done exactly what they intended to do which is to help them manage and organize their paper and digital documentation.
According to Barbier, the key to successfully running a small business is efficiency. Small businesses do not have a lesser need for streamlined logistics just because they are small. In fact, there may be an even greater need for efficiency in small businesses because they may not have the resources that larger, more cash-rich corporations have. Neat’s solutions help business owners not only organize critical data but also integrate that data into other essential systems within the business in order to establish a better information infrastructure.
One of the key elements of what Barbier calls Neat's "user interface refresh" is the revamping of its web product which involves an in-depth analysis by the Neat team of how customers interact with its entire product line. Contact management and digital marketing are two of Neat's top priorities. Despite the ongoing proliferation of digital communication in this the internet age, Neat recognizes the fact that much of the business world still operates on a very personal level in the sense that as much as entrepreneurs and business owners utilize email and other digital means of communications, things like business cards are still very much alive and well in the corporate world.
This has prompted the company to create products like their business card scanner that can help improve the flow of small business interaction. These scanners extract the contact information off of business cards and distribute that information to any number of digital resources such as Linked-In profiles and CRMs such as Salesforce thus eliminating the need for manual data entry.
One of the elements of Neat's repertoire that Barbier sees as being largely overlooked is the accounting aspect, specifically the tax management capabilities that the company offers. These management capabilities allow receipts and other important expenditure documentation to be scanned and stored throughout the fiscal year so that when tax time comes around, the job of retrieving and referencing important financial data for reporting purposes is much more streamlined and efficient.
Neat’s products currently integrate with Quickbooks accounting software but Barbier says that the company has plans in place to integrate with other products such as Freshbooks, Zero, and Sage as a means of expanding its product line and giving customers more options in terms of finding the right solutions for their specific business needs.
Neat’s plans for the rest of 2014 and into the early part of 2015 should see the company continuing in its position as a leading provider of small business solutions. One of the primary additions to Neat’s offerings is the release of a software package that is compatible with any scanner on the market. Currently Neat’s software only works with its own scanners but the company understands that customer’s want to be able to leverage the software with any scanner that they may have and Barbier says that this is exactly the need that the company is looking to fill.
One of Neat’s overarching goals is the move toward being more of a “cloud powered” company which Barbier says will help the company’s ability to integrate with other hardware and that is important for customers who want to implement Neat’s solutions with other hardware and software systems. For both Neat as well as for its customers, the future of small business looks very bright.
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