Small Business Is Big Business

Virtual Focus Targets The Small Business Market With Affordable Products, High-Level Customer Service And Long-Term Stability

It’s 1995 - Chris Mriscin is traveling from San Francisco to Wichita, Kansas to meet with friend Ken Gebhart. The purpose of the meeting is to discuss a potential business idea they’ve been tossing around for a while. Having dabbled in computers and the Internet, both Chris and Ken have a vision to develop a web site development company that will utilize their existing knowledge base and enable them to take advantage of the growing Internet area. After a three-hour discussion, a partnership is born - and with it, a company called Virtual Focus.

Initially a web site development company, in the late 90s Virtual Focus expanded into the hosting arena, and then became a reputable E-commerce provider. With approximately 12,000 current customers the company continues to grow, building on the expanding small and medium-sized (SME) market.

Virtual Focus has formed a niche market around SMEs, focusing on companies with an annual growth of less than $10 million and less than 20 employees. They also have a high number of home-based businesses. Mriscin, who is Vice President of Virtual Focus, says, “We have a truly affordable small business solution when you look at our E-commerce offering and our merchant account offering. It really is geared towards the small business.”

Virtual Focus offers highly flexible E-commerce solutions that provide businesses with all the tools and services necessary to design, build, host and operate a successful business on the Internet. The product that put the company on the map was virtualCART® , an effective and high quality shopping cart system that “uses HTML cart tags that can be installed on any existing web site, hosted anywhere.” Mriscin says, “It’s also flexible enough that it can be integrated with any existing merchant processing system and can work with different tax scenarios - a big thing on the Internet.” The product has garnered a loyal customer base, solidly positioning Virtual Focus in the market.

“We do almost no advertising with virtualCART®, but it’s amazing because we still get five to ten new customers every day,” explains Mriscin. “That’s actually our original shopping cart system – we have thousands of people on that system and it is one of the primary, and one of the largest, services that we offer.”

Building on this product, Virtual Focus has moved forward to invest in a more advanced, ‘next-generation’ E-commerce solution with more features and options called RetailCart. Mriscin points out, “As our customers grow, they need to move into another solution.” RetailCart is an affordable web site and E-commerce store building solution that is friendly enough for the beginner, yet powerful enough for the most demanding Web professional. It is perfect for businesses that already have an existing web site or are using an inferior cart system, and it is also a strong solution for those businesses just getting into the E-commerce market. The product can be used for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer E-commerce.

Both virtualCART® and RetailCart are very affordable, backed by solid customer service and supported by the tier-one backbone hosting facilities of Verio – a good mix that enables them to capture a large and loyal customer base. “Most small business – their biggest concern in today’s market is price. They are very price conscious and they want to know they’re getting value,” explains Mriscin. “Secondly, they want stability. Who are you guys? How long have you been around? The third question is what am I getting? What service are you actually providing me? It’s a good price but am I going to get good service?”

Mriscin explains that Virtual Focus’ competitive advantage is its affordability. He says, “If you look at our services, feature-to-feature we compare to services that are three to four times our price.” What also sets the company apart from its competitors is its customer support. “When you call our telephone number a ‘live’ person answers all the time,” shares Mriscin. In addition, he says, “Our staff are multi-faceted - they wear many hats. I’ve got developers who do web design and programming and also answer the telephone and e-mail.” Mriscin explains that doing this prevents employees from getting too bogged down in one project and provides variety to their jobs. This strategy has worked particularly well in areas that traditionally have experienced high turnover, like tech support. Mriscin also points out that having a multi-faceted team enables them to keep their costs down.

In addition to high-level customer service, Virtual Focus has a number of customer service touch points that enable customers to make decisions without direct contact with the company. “Our services are user friendly enough that probably 80 percent of our customers - we never really communicate with directly,” says Mriscin. “They can come to our web site, read, get educated on our services to determine if this is what they want. They can sign up. They can view and pay - all without human interaction. We also make the ability to contact us very easy, through toll free numbers, e-mail, and live chats.”

As far as the E-commerce industry goes, it is Mriscin’s belief that business-to-business will continue to grow. “Most of our development customers that have come to us recently - probably 50 percent of them have some type of B2B model,” explains Mriscin. The company’s RetailCart product is poised to take advantage of this growth.

Additionally, Mriscin shares, “Enterprise class projects and true medium-sized businesses are not the market.” Mriscin states, “Those guys – if they were going to do it, they’ve already done it. Some of them have been very successful; they might keep doing small amounts of investment. Other companies – again they either have it in-house or development is very small. Because of the economy right now your big enterprise and medium-sized businesses are holding out – that’s probably smart.”

Home-based businesses are experiencing significant growth. Mriscin explains, “The market is as strong now as it’s ever been. You look at how many large organizations are started up today – you can count them on one hand…these guys are pretty stagnant right now. You look at small business, they are what make up probably 95 out of a 100 new business licenses. These are the guys who keep coming. There’s a fresh stream every day.”

Mriscin offers some advice around working with small businesses. An important thing to remember when dealing with small businesses, explains Mriscin, “is that they are a lot more educated in that they know what E-commerce is about now.” Furthermore, Mriscin says, “They’re also very cautious and very frugal, looking to get the best bang for their buck, and also seeking good service.”

To ensure customers get the best product to meet their needs one of the things Mriscin enforces on the company’s salespeople is to make sure they qualify customers and find out what they want. “If we don’t offer something or we can’t meet their needs, we say that up front.” They don’t try to be everything to everyone. “We know who our customer is, we know what our market is. Our company’s biggest growth is going to be continued small business - home-based business. I would rather have 10,000 small companies than ten large ones.”

With a keen eye on what this market wants, and the delivery of solutions that meet the needs of both new and established E-commerce companies, Virtual Focus is set for continued growth and long-term stability in the small and medium-sized market.