For Small to Medium Businesses and Nonprofits, the Only Difference is Profit

For Small to Medium Businesses and Nonprofits, the only difference is profit

In every job I’ve had, my focus has been to create more profit than my salary and benefits cost my employer.   After all, profit is one of the most important metric, if not THE most important metric to which a company measures the success of its collective activities.   Furthermore, creating profit is not that easy.

For small to medium sized businesses (SMBs), the difference between turning a profit and incurring a loss sometimes rests on the outcome of a single business decision: whether or not to hire a new employee, to pursue a new market opportunity, to invest in advertising.

So when I began to research opportunities for Network Solutions in the nonprofit vertical (to use marketing jargon), I expected nonprofits to be a very different world with no commonality with the SMB customer base with whom Network Solutions is so familiar.   And I was completely wrong.

Whether you are a small to medium sized nonprofit, which I classify as having an annual budget of less than $5MM, or a small to medium sized business, you have a lot in common with each other.  In fact, for Small to Medium Businesses and Nonprofits (let’s call them “SMnPs”), the only difference is profit. 

I have found that SMB owners and their nonprofit counterparts, called Executive Directors, have the same challenges in most every aspect of their responsibilities.  Take sales and marketing, for example.  Both SMBs and SMnPs need to satisfy existing customers (donors) as well as acquire new ones.  Both need to reduce customer/donor churn to create consistent cash flow, and both need to understand how to effectively manage online services to drive their business or organization forward.

Network Solutions offers services to enable small and medium businesses to succeed and we’ve now taken this same experience and philosophy to solve critical problems for small to medium nonprofits and charitable organizations.    Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll highlight aspects of our Nonprofit Program that will help SMnPs map out a plan to reach and acquire new donors, communicate with and energize existing donors, and mitigate the challenge of managing the technology with bringing their organization online.