The Resurrection of Small Buisness

If you haven’t noticed, we here at Sentia aren’t overly respectful of big corporate business. This is because we have been in the corporate world and we have seen how they do things and know there is a better way. We even know what this better way is.

In a previous blog, I stated that if you are in the automobile industry, you design the car, build the car or sell the car. Anyone else is simply superfluous. Yes, I know it isn’t quite that simple, but it isn’t too far off the mark either.

No, we like small business. Mom and Pop run a lean, mean machine that does precisely what it needs to do and no more. The problem is that a small business owner has to nearly work himself to death to make a living. There is little time for vision or planning when there are orders to be filled, inventory to stock and books to be balanced.

Enter the Wal-Marts of the world (stage left, appropriately). They pay subsistence wages to their employees, if even that, strong arm their suppliers and literally don’t add any value to the products they sell except proximity. Through economies of scale, not through innovation do the huge faceless corporations make any profits at all. Who pays for endless layers of corporate management who make bad decisions, endless marketing campaigns and general incompetence? You do. The consumer. Do you think GIECO has any secret that any other car insurance company doesn’t have?  It is just a huge marketing budget that you pay for.

I am going to make a prediction and then I’m going to tell you how I’ll make it come true. There is going to be a golden age of small business coming, and soon. Probably in the next 5-7 years, the small business owner will once again dominate the market place they way they used to and the big corporate chains who add no value will go the way of the woolly Mammoth.The corporations have one thing that Mom and Pop don’t and that is information. Usually they have legions of analysts, accountants and clerks typing in and sifting data to figure out exactly how to do things. Mom and Pop just can’t afford to pay people to sift through terabytes of data looking for the one nugget.
Until NowSentia takes a holistic view of a business from Accounting and Human Resources to Manufacturing and Warehousing and everything in between. With this view in mind, we can design a database that will support the entire functionality of a business and then generate an application to get the information in and out of it. This means that a new application can be created in a matter of days, or hours, not months or years. With the holistic view, you don’t need to purchase applications that don’t communicate with each other to run various departments, we automate those departments out of existence.

Envision an office or plant that manages itself.  It does everything from ordering and inventory to shipping and receiving and every step along the way, all by itself.  Payroll becomes a report. Tax returns become reports. Process management is done via the application so you can track precisely who is doing what, which step he or she is executing, how much time and material he or she is spending on it, and all the associated capital and fixed costs so that you know precisely what a particular product or service costs to produce.

Some of you might recall a little company called Braniff. For those who don’t, Braniff declared bankruptcy in 1982 due to high fuel prices and airline deregulation and then finally called it quits in 1990. The reason Braniff went out of business? They couldn’t calculate how much it costs to fly you from one spot to the other. That sounds like egregious incompetence until you find out that no airline today can tell you how much it is going to cost per seat with any degree of accuracy; how much it costs per seat to execute any given route.

It really isn’t their fault. Before now, the more complex a process became, the more inputs and outputs were required, the more time it took to develop and algorithm to describe it. The upshot of this fact is that as a process approaches infinite complexity, like calculating the cost to fly a passenger jet around the country/world, the time to solve it also approaches infinity. Sentia has broken this paradigm by generating software of nearly infinite complexity by breaking a problem down to its constituent parts, describing the various pieces in a database and then generating the code to get data in and out of that database.

If you’ve been following the blog, you have heard this story. Mark Zuckerberg has spent tens of millions (maybe hundreds of millions) of dollars and hundreds of thousands of man hours developing Facebook. Sentia took on a contract with a new client (currently in development) to combine the functionality of eBay, Craigslist, Angie’s list and Facebook and we estimated the project would take three man weeks. Three. 21 days. One developer. Kinda makes ol’ Mark look dumb doesn’t it?

We’ve made a bold prediction: The resurrection of the small business. We’ve shown you how it will happen. What is really going to bake your noodle later is when you realize that we can have economies of scale with small boutique businesses. Mom and Pop can have a big distribution center like a Wal-Mart if they get together and pool their resources. What is going to bug you even more is when you realize that Mom and Pop (and everyone else for that matter) all do business the same way, so they can share (some) information (in a very secure fashion of course) with each other and have shipments of disparate items all going the same direction at the same time go on the same plane/train/truck and it can all happen seamlessly and not wastefully send everything to Memphis first. They won’t even have to pay the big faceless corporation of UPS or FedEx.

Think about it and get back to me.