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We recently talked with Andrea Peiro, founder and CEO of the Small Business Technology Institute (SBTI), to find out about how technology can help with some of the biggest challenges facing small businesses today. Mr. Peiro is a recognized authority on Small Business technology, a fervid advocate of the values of the Small Business community and international speaker.

Q: In your work, what do you find are the biggest challenges facing small businesses right now?

A: The biggest challenge for any small business in our fast-paced economy is to find stability and balance. Small businesses are organizations that can grow fast and shrink fast, and each one needs to find a stable niche, to find its own identity and structure. A common misconception is that most small businesses want to grow and need to grow, but this is not necessarily the case. There are some small businesses that are suitable for growth and expansion, but the majority of small businesses are structured in such a way that they will want to remain small. Entrepreneurs are in business to make money through doing what they like, and growth often requires them to spend more time outside of their "core competency" than they would like.

Small businesses are also exposed to a more concrete set of challenges related to their day-to-day operations. These challenges can be considered according to the primary five domains that small businesses work and operate through: Marketing, Operations, Financial Management, Productivity and General Management.

On top of the list often are the marketing challenges. The majority of small business owners wake up in the morning thinking about how they will get to their next customer, and go to bed at night thinking about it. Then there are Financial challenges: being able to pay their bills on time, and ensuring that their clients pay their invoices when they're supposed to are always important issues for any small company. In the realm of Operations, the challenges usually depend on whether or not the business deals with inventory. If the business has inventory, the primary challenge is always related to managing it. If the business has no inventory, for example in a service company, then the biggest challenge tends to be achieving effective collaboration at the human level in terms of sharing ideas and work and making things happen quickly and well. Collaborative environments tend to be conducive to much higher performance than non-collaborative environments.

When it comes to Productivity, small businesses, like large businesses, often have to deal with large amounts of bureaucracy: proposal writing, presentation development, and similar tasks that can be extremely time-consuming. It is vital to ensure that the key people in any small organization aren't completely consumed with this kind of chores, so they can focus their energy on strategically critical duties.

The key set of practical challenges, with the deepest strategic implications and the most impact on long-term success always occur, though, at a General Management level, with the ongoing quest to obtain a really complete picture of business performance and to have the right information to make the right decision available at all times. Who are the best customers and who are the worst customers? How did we get the best ones, and what type of marketing activities can we do to reach them? How can we replicate the tactics that succeeded? What are the products or services with the best margins and who is buying them?