Building A Business By Solving Problems For Small Businesses

Entrepreneurs often solve their own problems. As a serial entrepreneur in companies as varied as manufacturing, systems integration, and products, Lil Roberts had seen that small business owners across industries often didn’t have the timely financial key performance metrics they needed for informed decision making. She had started businesses from scratch, bought distressed companies and turned them around, but had never scaled a business with equity financing. “I wanted to be part of reshaping an archaic industry,” she stressed — that required venture capital. 

The time delay between accounting record keeping and getting financial reports was acute for companies with fewer than 20 employees. And that describes the vast majority of firms. Worse yet, some of these companies don’t do their books regularly. As a result, they don’t know their cash flow needs or the best ways of minimizing their taxes. They don’t know if they will be able to pay their employees or vendors three months down the road. Nor do they have readily available the financials banks want if small business owners need loans. 

Good bookkeeping platforms are many, so there was no need to reinvent that. Roberts chose Xero as the platform on which she would build. Her company would focus on speeding up the human process of getting bookkeeping information into and out of Xero. Roberts would use technology to automate repetitive functions and humans for higher-level tasks. 

In 2016, she set out to digitize the process and, by 2017, she had built a minimal viable product (MVP) and launched Xendoo. The first half a million dollars was bootstrapped. Roberts invested her money into the company. 

Roberts is a long-time member of Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) in South Florida. She served on the board of her local chapter for several years.

Read more: forbes