Quite right Peter; the improvement I'd like to see all small businesses make is in the quality and timeliness of their financial reporting and forecasting. With software such as Xero it's possible to automate most of the bookkeeping and then get detailed reports such as gross margin by business segment. Link Xero to a forecasting app - even it's inbuilt Syft - for a view of the future. This improved data flow and analytics is available to all businesses not just large corpoates and will transform the business performance if interpreted correctly.

For my clients its mostly their family - partner and kids - who are the most important people to them.