Top-performing medium-sized enterprises as an important niche audience which play a crucial role in our economy and job growth yet remains largely disconnected.
During his 12 year tenure as Chair of the Australian Small Business Council, one of the key observations
GAP’s Managing Director Peter Fritz recalled was that large business and government both traditionally make the mistake of trying to speak to all SMEs as a group, while a more efficient and effective approach would be to identify those most successful, who really “punch above their weight”, as they are in fact the engine room of the Australian economy.
For instance, research conducted by the Council in the early 1990s found that of the close to one million small businesses in Australia at that time, only a handful, 750 SMEs in total, were responsible for 85% of Australia's exports of elaborately manufactured goods.
Almost 20 years later, the number of actively trading Australian SMEs is over 2.01 million, but over 1.1 million of those are non-employing entities (ABS, 2007) and around 93% per cent of all businesses fall into the ‘micro-business’ category, with turnover of less than $2 million per year.
Peter took an educated guess that there were “probably only about 5,000 very successful medium sized enterprises in Australia, with a turnover above $10 million a year, and that with the use of web 2.0 technologies available it was now possible to create an effective network for them”.
