Child Entrepreneur Kevin Sproles: CEO Of Volusion (Part 7)

SM: Earlier you brought up 1M/1M. I am interested in helping your customers, who are largely small businesses, gain entry into our program so they can reach $1 million in revenue and beyond. Some of your team members have already had discussions about it. It would be great if we could join hands on this.

KS: I think a lot of the things you mention in 1M/1M are right in line with what I have done. I often say in interviews such as this that what someone needs to do to build a successful business is to plan the details. I think you mentioned that less than 25% of them actually do. They are often focused on owning a business and making money. They do not put enough time into the idea of how to make money. They don’t look at it one sale at a time. They do not look at profit margins per item they sell. They need to take that to the next step and figure out how they are going to get leads and how they are going to pay for those leads.

SM: The entire process of business building is critical. There are 600,000 companies that go out of business every year. It is amazing. I call that the infant entrepreneur mortality rate.

KS: You are right, though. It is all about education. They need to learn how to capitalize. A lot of times they just have to tweak their model. If we partner on this more and bring this to our customers, we would want to tweak it a little bit. I know on your blog you encourage people to not start their business until they have a lot of it figured out. Our customers have already started their businesses.

SM: In 1M/1M we have a lot of people who already have revenue and sizeable revenues. Some of them are getting started and are working with PowerPoint presentations. We have all stages. We are focused on the sub-100 range because that is where the risk, the infant entrepreneur mortality, is the highest. We do support a lot of companies that are launched and in business.

KS: I think it would be great. We try to educate our customers now through our blog. We give them tips every couple of days. That would be a good channel for us to reach out. You could even talk to customers directly through a simple direct post. There are probably some other things we could do as well. There are options.

SM: We can talk more about that online. We can help your customers. You have a very important customer base in some ways because it is a group that has a large number of small businesses. If you can help them learn and be educated, and the overall economic impact would be very high.

KS: That is a win/win because we want our customers to be successful. That can help them do that.

SM: I really enjoyed your story, and this time talking has been great. Stories like yours are timely because there is such high youth unemployment right now. Your story will be inspiring for young people trying to find direction. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Child Entrepreneur Kevin Sproles: CEO Of Volusion
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