Microbusiness Owners Experience Microinequities
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Today our internet connection was disrupted. For 4 hours. During peak business hours (mid-morning to early afternoon) on a Monday.
If this happened to a “regular” business, it would be unacceptable. The internet service provider would likely take measures to mitigate disruption, for example, by conducting work during the weekends or after business hours.
But this is in a residential area, and most companies that provide services take a more laissez faire approach to service outages and disruptions in residential areas. Perhaps companies serving residential areas assumed that the neighborhood would be at work.
They didn’t count on the countless microbusiness owners like me who operate business – and I mean a REAL BUSINESS – out of our homes.
A few weeks ago, my internet connection was out for over 24 hours. When I complained to the service rep about the disruption that this outage is causing my business, she said that since I am in a residential area, my problem is not prioritized the same way as an outage in a business area would be. She was apologetic, but the implication is that disruption to my business mattered less.
I tend to write off glass ceilings of most kinds, because I believe that focusing too much on these glass ceilings took my eyes off the doors of opportunities that I can create for greater reward. However, over these past few years, I’ve noticed these micro-inequities experienced by microbusiness owners. To be fair, I am not saying that service providers are deliberately discounting microbusiness owners. Most of us also do not shell out wads of cash for premium business-level services either because we run a lean business or because we don’t need the gravy that comes with premium.
After all, we become microbusiness owners because we choose to be microbusiness owners.
Make no mistake – microbusiness ownership is not about “micro-profits”. We opt to limit our size to align our businesses with our personal values, but we are focused on creating the greatest return on investment. I personally would not want to become an entrepreneur if I could not gain both tangible and intangible returns from taking this risk.
Still, we as microbusiness owners are often “hidden”.
Our businesses run invisibly from residential areas, yet many of us command a global presence on the web. We may have mastered the art of lean operations, yet our scale precludes us from gaining priority service to run our businesses. We may have gained respect in our field and for our business successes, yet we are not recognized in many B2B transactions.
This may be the time for us to come together as microbusiness owners, and start by doing what Dawn Rivers Bakers advocates us to do: identify ourselves as microbusiness entrepreneurs. We can create microbusiness consortium to learn from each other. We can come together to help us all get a better business deal for our microbusiness operations.
What say you?
Micro-Inequities? Let me count the ways….. No I’d better not, I’d be typing for days.
Here are some of my biggies for a MicroBiz not working out of the home.
The cost of a Business Phone. 2 to 3 times Residential cost
Internet access. 2.5X Normal
Credit Card Processing Much more than a huge corp.
Utilities At least twice as expensive as home
Sales Tax! on Store Rent,Phone,Electricity, Only in Florida!
And the biggest… The public being misled by the media and the government to think that all those wonderful “Small Business” programs help the little guy.
Did the Maddof scandal affect us? I don’t think so.
Hi Ray, thank you for your input! Did you opt for “business account” level services for your microbusiness? If you did not have the level of scale, I can see how you end up paying a lot more than the average big business that get a volume based discount. Many of us, including myself, go for the personal / residential level service since my needs don’t warrant a business level account at this time. What did you end up doing to find a more satisfactory solution than what you had experienced?
There aren’t many options available to a micro biz like mine once I had to move out of the home into a business location. As my address was considered a business address (as determined by the Phone Co, Utility Dist, etc) the higher rates are automatically applied.
One thing I’m doing this year is to get Cable internet access (at twice the price of my home cable access) but start using Vonage or a similar Voip service. The higher rate of access will be more than offset by the cheaper phone lines with unlimited minutes. And, I’ll have faster service than the current DSL with MaBell.
Incidentally, I have found all of these items are much more expensive in Florida than they were in Nevada, where I moved from.
Thanks for the follow-up, Ray. Location is a big factor. Here in California, everything is expensive, including running a business. If you make absolutely zero dollars in your business or lose money, you still automatically owe the state $800 (and if you make more, then it’s taxed above $800). Hence CA ranks dead last 2 years in a row when polled by CEOs in Chief Executive magazine.
A bit of a contradiction here -speaking as someone who signed up for “premium business-level services” when I was still working out of my home. Much of that “gravy” that comes with the “premium” is being a priority when problems arise. Regardless of where you work from, you’re only a priority if you pay for it. It’s a contradiction to say you don’t need those gravy services and then complain when you don’t get them. You’re only entitled to what you pay for. How would you feel about a customer who is demanding services of you that they’re not paying for? Sure, you start by hook and crook but it’s not disrespect of you or your enterprise for a service provider to fail to provide the level of services if you’re not paying for it. It’s one of the things you have to compromise until you can pony up the full cost of doing business. Look at is this way, you can provide services for less than I can because your expenses are lower. You can’t complain about a system from which you are deriving benefit (having your cake and eating it too).
Now I have a business location; I’m my only employee. As Ray said, I pay three times as much for water and garbage service at my office when I use far less than my home; my rent is twice the cost of my mortgage. Even my banking services are higher so I don’t feel the least bit guilty that I can get in the much shorter line for commercial banking customers. So yeah, I do feel entitled to “gravy” but that’s because I’m paying for it.
Kathleen, I’m not sure we’re disagreeing. If you pay for the extras, you certainly are entitled to the extras.
The business “gravy” may be personalized touch and faster response in some types of businesses. I’m fine if I get generic tech support rather than my own business account executive who has my info on file and knows me by my first name.
However, I don’t consider having a service working and not being disrupted for 4-5 hours “the norm”, whether I’m a consumer or a business owner. It’s one thing if I refused to pay extra to get a higher speed of internet service, for example, and then my browser slows to a crawl because the company was unable to deliver based on the amount of consumption from my business activities. It’s another if I’m paying for “service” and then get “no service” or “disrupted and discontinuous service” due to the company’s inappropriate response measure to expected service problems.
Whatever the nature of your microbusiness, you have decided for one reason or another that you are required to rent an office space in a business location. Most of the emerging microbusiness owners today – and I suspect many who began years ago and continue operating – chose to operate from their home locations because their operation does not require this measure, or because it did not make sense to their bottom-line. In other words, there are many microbusiness owners who are also consumers / customers of businesses, except they are consuming through their business.
Perhaps what you and Ray and all businesses experience is a more systemic problem – paying a much higher cost just because you’re operating “as a business” rather than based on use or level of service required. Because of higher cost, many companies can’t necessarily match the product quality or service level that a smaller operation without overhead may create, but those located at “business locales” still need to pass that overhead expense onto their products and services to consumers. Then people like you and me will end up paying for that overhead.
For better or worse there are trade offs. If uninterrupted internet is business critical; you can opt for low speed residential cable and DSL service, and get a dual WAN router. The router will automatically balance the load between the two connections, and if one goes down the other will still work.
… Now all I need is a reason/business to justify it…