Fast Lane: Happy birthday to us! How times have changed in SmartCompany’s eight years

Eight years ago SmartCompany was published for the first time.

Back then, SmartCompany was quite revolutionary – an online publication that wrote about small and medium businesses and championed entrepreneurs.

Since then we’ve published hundreds of thousands of articles uncovering the issues which impact SMEs and profiling those inspiring entrepreneurs who are all too often overlooked elsewhere.

In our first free newsletter sent on February 1, 2007 business confidence was down and wages high.

Sounds familiar.

Many of the articles are still very relevant today like the analysis of how many companies “bomb” on ASX listing and why.

Some familiar faces were on board from the start, with employment law expert Peter Vitale writing a column along with self-managed super fund expert Michael Lawrence and psychologist Eve Ash.

Emma Brown wrote about her fledgling women’s networking business; Brown is of course now Emma Isaacs, the founder of  the phenomenally successful Business Chicks.

Meanwhile Naomi Simson, founder of Red Balloon, considered the speed humps for small business.

It’s been great to grow alongside these business experts and entrepreneurs and to celebrate their success along the way.

Eight years on, publishing solely online is not considered quite so strange, but one thing hasn’t changed at all.

SmartCompany is still one of the few voices for SMEs and entrepreneurs in the media.

The mainstream business press continues to focus on the big end of town to the exclusion of Australia’s two million SMEs.

We’re proud of the SmartCompany community which has evolved over the past eight years.

To make sure we continue to keep our finger exactly on the pulse of Australia’s SME and entrepreneurial communities today, we are announcing the appointment of SmartCompany’s advisory panel.

We welcome some of Australia’s most interesting and informed business minds to the panel: Matt Barrie, Kosmas Smyrnios, Penny Spencer and Peter Strong.

We’re also conducting a survey of all our readers (with great prizes up for grabs) to find out how to make SmartCompany even bigger and better.

Thanks to our founders Amanda Gome and Eric Beecher for their vision and the editors and journalists who have worked on SmartCompany over the years.

Kudos to our current team Eloise Keating, Kirsten Robb, Engel Schmidl, Andrew Sadauskas and Broede Carmody but most of all thanks to all our readers for making SmartCompany what it is.

We’re excited about the future for SMEs in Australia and for SmartCompany.