Smibs You Later |
Web-based entrepreneur Peter Urban picks up where Facebook leaves off
by Michael Hingston
Since July of last year, Peter Urban has hosted a web series for SmibsTV called The Grow Smart Show, in which he interviews various entrepreneurs and small business owners about their craft. There are no specific rules for choosing guests; the Edmonton-based Urban simply tracks down people he admires and tries to showcase what makes them compelling – not to mention successful – figures. The show, already more than 25 episodes into its run, has featured professional bloggers, coffee shop owners, technology evangelists, photographers and horse breeders, and has taken Urban everywhere from suburban Alberta all the way to Silicon Valley.
But here’s the thing: Peter Urban isn’t a journalist. He’s an entrepreneur, just like the people he interviews, one who specializes in marketing and technology development. And Smibs, the online tech company that produces The Grow Smart Show? Urban owns it.
Making and freely distributing web content is all part of his larger theory about how small businesses can thrive in the digital world. To Urban, making products that people want to buy is only one part of the battle. You also have to get your name and message to stick in the heads of your potential customers – and he believes the web offers some truly innovative ways to do just that. Producing free videos with noted business personalities (each of whom will presumably direct their audiences to the Smibs website) is one. Blogging is another, says Urban. So is Twitter.
He could go on. It turns out he speaks just as quickly in person as he does during interviews for his show, where his excitability for cutting-edge technology is palpable. He’s got a charming German accent, too – a product of growing up in Heidelberg, which is also where he cut his teeth in business in his early 20s. (Before that, Urban made a name for himself racing cars as a teenager, where he was teammates with future Formula One superstar Michael Schumacher and made it to the F3 circuit before calling it quits, tired of chasing down sponsorship dollars.)
Now 39, with almost two decades of marketing consulting experience under his belt, Urban and his wife, Christy, have co-founded Smibs with two main goals: helping small businesses better manage sales and project data, and allowing like-minded professionals to connect over a Facebook-esque corporate network.
To achieve the first goal, Smibs is launching a suite of web-based applications that will reduce costs by streamlining workflow into a centralized, online database and by allowing users easy access to collaborators on the other side of the city, the country or the world. In other words, it helps businesses grow smart. Smibs’ first commercial product, Doorbell, is a CRM (customer relationship management) system designed specifically for small- and medium-sized clients. Urban notes that this makes it a rarity in an otherwise packed market – but that’s not the only thing it does differently.
“When we looked at building Doorbell, I thought, ‘Something is inherently wrong with how web-based software is provided,’” Urban says. “There are lots of applications out there – all are what we call ‘silos’ or ‘islands.’” In these other programs, users have access to all kinds of resources and organizational applications, but are unable to share or co-ordinate their work with others. To view someone else’s work, you must be given access to their account – and even then there’s the risk of inconsistencies being introduced as users attempt to manage identical sets of data in parallel.
For anyone working as part of a team, or for a contract worker with several different jobs on the go, the juggling of tasks and switching back and forth between virtual worksites can overwhelm the actual tasks to be completed. “All of a sudden,” Urban says, “I have to check into 15 systems every morning just to know what to do today.”
Doorbell centralizes the whole process. Rather than collaborating parties each keeping separate records of the same data, they are instead able to share the relevant information from their databases with one another. You simply sign into your personal account, and everything you need to see pops up in one customizable dashboard.
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