I am also responsible for the Missouri Procurement Assistance Centers and am a past-president and current member of the Board of Directors of the Association for Small Business Development Centers. More specifically, at the Missouri SBDC, we have dedicated an entire research and product development unit to e-commerce efforts. The rules are changing for today's small businesses. Today's business owners cannot run their businesses like their fathers did. Transaction costs are approaching zero.
Competition is craftier and more plentiful than ever before.
The entire world is the marketplace. In the past, physical location was critical to business success, but that premise is now obsolete. Unfortunately, many businesses do not understand the magnitude of the changes taking place around them. Gordon Moore, founder of Intel, notes that for the last 30 years, computer processing power has doubled every 18 months. The logical result has been a reduction of transaction costs on the open market, which challenges the role of the traditional middleman.