RAI Stone Analytics Announces Partnership with the State of Wisconsin, Offering Helping Hand to Small Businesses with Next Stage Prosperity Initiative

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rai-stone-analytics_logoRAI Stone Analytics today announced its partnership with the State of Wisconsin. The Next Stage Prosperity Initiative will use the RAI Stone Analytics platform to unite county economic development agencies, the University of WI, small business development centers, and small businesses in Wisconsin.

Capitalizing upon business development opportunities throughout Wisconsin requires strong partnerships between local, regional and state economic development stakeholders,” said Mark Hogan, secretary and chief executive officer at the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC). “WEDC is proud to support Barron County’s cutting-edge Small Business Prosperity Strategy aimed at maximizing the performance of second-stage companies in western and northwestern Wisconsin.”

RAI Stone’s cloud-based SaaS system provides financial service providers and their clients with clearly presented data that looks at past and present company performance, as well as to the future with predictive analytics. The platform will assist state agencies and small business centers as they guide SMBs to make informed operating decisions, which will help them meet their goals, grow and survive in a tough economic environment.

With RAI Stone, Next Stage Prosperity advisors can provide small and mid-size business clients with the outlook and insights they need to make informed decisions in as little as 15 minutes. Using its powerful algorithms, financial service providers can analyze the gap between their customers’ current business performance and their goals, without spending mind-numbing hours collecting data, running ratios, or building complex spreadsheets.

Organizers of the Next Stage Prosperity Initiative hope this model will be adopted by other State bodies around the United States, offering essential advice and support for small to medium sized businesses that are so important to repairing the national economy, which is still recovering from the 2008 crash.

In a recent Forbes article, Martin Zwilling argues that second stage business development requires aggressive growth, as after celebrating success at the first stage, many businesses find themselves ill-prepared to move to the next stage for scaling their business into a high-performing enterprise. This often leads to entrepreneur burnout, growth plateaus, and founders being replaced.

Rather than solely focusing on companies in the initial growth stages, the initiative offers help to companies that are in their second stage of growth. According to statistics published by the Small Business Administration (SBA), only half of all employer establishments survive their first five years, and a third survive ten years or more. These companies that have up to 50 employees, which are over 3 years old and want to grow in their present communities. Because they’re so busy keeping the day to day business running, this population, often flies under the radar of most state agencies, as they rarely reach out for assistance until it’s too late.

Micro, small and medium sized enterprises are a dynamic force for sustained economic growth and job creation and act as the economic engine for the U.S. economy. Many more companies could survive and grow if provided with the right tools.

As a partner in the Next Stage Prosperity initiate, RAI Stone aims to offer them these tools and contribute to the local economies and job markets which will build stronger, more vibrant communities for millions of Americans.

Our platform enables SMBs to understand how various choices will impact their cash flow, profit, and overall financial stability, to prevent thousands of local businesses from failing in their second stages of development,” said Sam Zordich, Founder and CEO of RAI Stone Analytics. “We hope the positive changes we are seeing with Next Stage Prosperity will soon seen be assimilated all around the U.S.”

The pilot project for Next Stage Prosperity has been extremely encouraging. In 2014 the Eau Claire Area EDC implemented a process to support a well-known company that found itself in financial distress due to the downturn in the economy. After garnering technical expertise to drive solutions for the company; the business was able to regain form and close 2014 with a 12-month backlog on production capacity. Without implementing this process the company would likely have filed bankruptcy and approximately 30 employees would have lost their jobs.

 

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