When talking to a wide variety of outsiders about SoftLayer, one question inevitably comes up. “Who are your customers?” It always takes a bit of explaining – it’s a bit like asking the power company the same question. In the power company’s case, the answer is “anyone who needs electricity.” SoftLayer’s customers run the gamut. There is no one particular industry vertical that dominates our customer base. Pretty much anyone who needs dependable, robust, hosted IT services is our customer, or potential customer.

Now, if we look outside of the silos of industry verticals, there is one type of customer that stands out more than others. That is the entrepreneurial small business. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy and the engine of economic growth, and thus I need to keep up with what is going on with things that affect small businesses.

So I ran across a study worth passing along via a blog post. It is produced by Kauffman: The Foundation of Entrepreneurship and is entitled “The Anatomy of an Entrepreneur: Family Background and Motivation.” It contains some valuable insights into some traits of the majority of our customers. These traits below are taken straight from the report:

Company founders tend to be middle-aged and well-educated, and did better in high school than in college

• The average and median age of company founders
  in our sample when they started their current
  companies was 40. (This is consistent with our
  previous research, which found the average and
  median age of technology company founders to
  be 39).
• 95.1 percent of respondents themselves had earned
  bachelor’s degrees, and 47 percent had more
  advanced degrees.

These entrepreneurs tend to come from middle-class or upper-lower-class backgrounds, and were better educated and more entrepreneurial than their parents

• 71.5 percent of respondents came from middle-class
  backgrounds (34.6 percent upper-middle class and
  36.9 percent lower-middle class). Additionally, 21.8
  percent said they came from upper-lower-class
  families (blue-collar workers in some form of
  manual labor).
• Less than 1 percent came from extremely rich or
  extremely poor backgrounds

Most entrepreneurs are married and have children

• 69.9 percent of respondents indicated they were
  married when they launched their first business. An
  additional 5.2 percent were divorced, separated, or
  widowed.
• 59.7 percent of respondents indicated they had at
  least one child when they launched their first
  business, and 43.5 percent had two or more
  children.

Early interest and propensity to start companies

• Of the 24.5 percent who indicated that they were
  “extremely interested” in becoming entrepreneurs
  during college, 47.1 percent went on to start more
  than two companies (as compared to 32.9 percent
  of the overall sample).
• The majority of the entrepreneurs in our sample
  were serial entrepreneurs. The average number of
  businesses launched by respondents was
  approximately 2.3; 41.4 percent were starting their
  first businesses.

Motivations for becoming entrepreneurs: building wealth, owning a company, startup culture, and capitalizing on a business idea

• 74.8 percent of respondents indicated desire to
  build wealth as an important motivation in
  becoming an entrepreneur. This factor was rated as
  important by 82.1 percent of respondents who
  grew up in “lower-upper-class” families.
• 68.1 percent of respondents indicated that
  capitalizing on a business idea was an important
  motivation in becoming an entrepreneur.
• 66.2 percent said the appeal of a startup culture
  was an important motivation.
• 60.3 percent said that working for others did not
  appeal to them. Responses to this question were
  relatively evenly distributed in a rough bell curve,
  with 16 percent of respondents citing this as an
  extremely important factor and 16.8 percent of
  respondents citing it as not at all a factor.

Not only do the traits above describe a big chunk of SoftLayer’s customers – they also describe the people of SoftLayer.

If you are an entrepreneurial small business and you need a hosted IT service provider who understands your needs, you will find a likeminded partner in SoftLayer. Many of the small businesses who joined with us two or three years ago aren’t so small anymore, and that’s fine! When our customers succeed, we succeed. We get that.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 23rd, 2009 at 11:33 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.