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Xero customers share realities of small business life in new campaign

Global business platform, Xero, has today launched a social series which celebrates what it is to be a small business owner and unearths some of the rawest moments they face.

‘Good Days, Bad Days’ uses a series of documentary-style videos to tell the stories of seven small business owners from Australia, New Zealand, US, UK and Singapore. The campaign was done in-house.

The launch video for the series is live today, with the individual stories to be released each week over the span of a two month period, across YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.

Xero’s chief customer officer, Rachael Powell, said: “Being a small business owner is one of the greatest adventures anyone can embark on. It’s a journey full of good days, but it’s important to recognise that there are also bad days that everyone goes through. By spotlighting these customers’ stories, we want to create a platform for the small business community to openly share experiences to show that they are not alone.”

Delivered over an eight week period, beginning with the launch video, the series dives into each business owner’s individual story; their highs, their lows and what motivates them to keep going.

The series itself will be hosted on Xero’s YouTube channel, and videos will be supplemented with content and resources from Xero that can equip small businesses as they navigate their own journey.

“This is really about having empathy and understanding of everything that a small business operator has to deal with,” Powell said. “It’s not just about running their finances, it’s managing their staff, and even looking at ways to improve their cash flow through getting loans from banks. It’s the evolution of us positioning ourselves as a small business accounting platform to a more overall small business platform, where we have thousands of bespoke apps that also plug in to our platform that help these niche small businesses run their business in a way that suits them, and give them access to tools that they wouldn’t normally have access to.”

The campaign complements the Small Business Index, part of the Xero Small Business Insights (XSBI) program, connecting the economic performance of the sector with the emotional side of running a business.

“We can see how the small business economy is performing each month through our Index. The ‘Good Days, Bad Days’ stories offer insight into the emotional peaks and troughs that come with being a small business owner, and are testament to the adaptability of small businesses,” Powell said.

“From a brand perspective, what sets Xero apart from our competitors is that we really are trying to be the voice for small businesses, given that it is an underserved segment of the market, but it is so fundamentally important. From driving the Gross Domestic Product and the growth within the markets where we operate. Particularly at the moment, off the back of the pandemic, it will be small businesses that will resurge a lot of our economies.

“We’ve definitely seen that with a lot of our small business customers, in the way they had to think differently to be able to create revenue streams from themselves as they’ve moved into a world where they’ve had to go into hibernation, in terms of bricks and mortar shop fronts and find different ways to serve their customers,” Powell concluded.

Founded in New Zealand in 2006, the online accounting platform made for small businesses now has over 2.7 million users globally, with 1.12 million Australian entrepreneurs having signed up.

A survey carried out by Lonergan Research, which included responses from more than 500 small business owners (businesses with fewer than 20 employees) across the country, reported that 81% said that running their business is taking away from their personal lives.

Small business owners are also generally under-holidayed, with 53% of respondents sacrificing family holidays for their business, under-romanced, with 39% of singles not able to remember their last date, and overall lacking sleep.

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