Vanilla

Intuit “Future of Small Business” Series

Will K. — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 15:37:09 +0000

Everybody knows that the world is moving faster and becoming harder and harder to keep up with. A few years ago, Intuit decided to help by launching a study of the major trends that will be affecting small businesses and entrepreneurship in the coming decade. The series has released four different reports since 2007 (about one per year), but my personal favorite is the first installment which describes the diverse wave of people that will be taking the entrepreneurial plunge in the future. These include baby boomers looking for “the next adventure,” Gen-Yers who don’t want corporate careers, mompreneurs, professional women who are climbing around the glass ceiling, and immigrant entrepreneurs who have contacts here, there, and everywhere. Intuit offers a one-page fact sheet called The Changing Face of Small Business, or you can look at the whole Future of Small Business Series at Intuit’s web site. The study provides some great glimpses of the big picture.

Co-Ops: A Better Way of Doing Business

vanillacoop — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 14:44:51 +0000

Anyone who starts a business faces some pivotal choices right at the outset. Not just what to name your company and what products or services to offer, but bigger issues like: What type of culture do I want to create? What do I want to stand for?

One of the toughest choices I faced with Vanilla was whether or not to make it a co-op. Like a lot of ideas I come up with, it seemed completely idealistic and impractical at first. After all, nobody’s ever done it before (not in the accounting industry, anyway) and co-ops involve complexities that regular businesses don’t have to deal with. Furthermore, co-ops have a hard time attracting capital because they lack a traditional profit motive. I weighed these issues in my mind and asked myself the same question over and over again. What do you really want to do: start a successful business, or stick to your ideals?

The answer, of course, was that I wanted to do both. I worked in the outdoors and natural foods industries for ten year before I became a CPA and my role models have always been socially responsible businesses like Patagonia and Stonyfield Farm. I believe that all businesses have the opportunity to make a positive difference in the world. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the co-op approach had everything I was looking for:

1. A strong set of values and principles emphasizing things like honesty, equality, and social responsibility.

2. A progressive business model that fosters collective ownership and strives to return profits to its members.

3. A community approach to business that encourages working together and cares for the well-being of customers, employees and their families, and local communities.

When I took a step back from my everyday life and tried to look ten or twenty years into the future (not the easiest thing to do… but it get’s a little easier as you grow older), I figured that was the type of company I’d be most proud of. So I decided to go for it.

Thinking Small

Will K. — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:48:42 +0000

If I could boil the inspiration for Vanilla down to one phrase, it would be this: Think Small. I was working my first job at an accounting firm in Newport Beach, CA and I saw how frustrated business owners were with the traditional way of doing things (the slowness, the jargon, the confusing array of services). I figured there had to be a better way, so I decided to start my own company.

From the beginning, I wanted Vanilla to be a niche firm. Instead of trying to do everything, I wanted to focus on a limited range of services designed especially for smaller companies. In addition, I wanted to create a company that looked at the world through an entrepreneur’s eyes. In an industry dominated by big firms with longwinded names, I wanted Vanilla to be just the opposite: small, unpretentious, and easy to work with.

If I could do those two things, then I figured I’d have a decent shot of making it in the accounting industry. And that’s how Vanilla was born.