30 Innovative Brands of the Year 2022
The Silicon Review
Starting a business on your own can be intimidating. From filing your business to legal paperwork, setting up your website and getting your banking details in order, it can be overwhelming for a first-time entrepreneur. However, small business owners don’t need to go it alone. There is a plethora of resources available that can help any person master business ownership and feel confident on their business journey.
While there are many services that can help a new business owner get up and running, ZenBusiness stands out from the rest. ZenBusiness is the only guided platform tailored for the entrepreneur’s journey to launch, run, and grow a successful business. Empowering the new generation of entrepreneurs, ZenBusiness provides innovative tools, fintech, educational resources, and world-class customer support to assist hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs, gig workers, online sellers, real estate investors, artists, and freelancers on their journey to success. By giving small businesses what they need -- worry-free services, frontline support, and an all-inclusive platform -- ZenBusiness makes taking the leap towards building a better life as simple as possible.
In conversation with Ross Buhrdorf, Founder and CEO of ZenBusiness
Q. In a highly competitive world we live in, how do you diversify yourself from the rest?
ZenBusiness supports business owners from their first steps as entrepreneurs to reaching their first dollar and beyond. We aren’t just an LLC formation service, website builder, or banking app. We are a complete guided platform that stays with our customers through every part of their entrepreneurial journey to ensure their success. We handle the ‘business stuff’ – financial management, banking, legal paperwork, marketing, websites, and more – so our customers can focus on building the life and business they want.
Q. How do you recruit the right talents for maintaining the quality of your service?
ZenBusiness understands the value of selecting the best talent to support our customers through their entrepreneurial journey. We tap all resources available, including posting job openings on Glassdoor, Indeed, and LinkedIn and encouraging qualified individuals to apply. We also leverage our network of experienced experts and encourage the brightest minds in the field to join the ZenBusiness team. In early 2020, ZenBusiness went fully remote, which enabled us to hire top talent from across the United States. We’ve found that bringing together a diverse workforce from different geographical areas, backgrounds, and communities makes for a happier and more productive employee base, which helps create a better ZenBusiness platform.
Tell us about your extensive portfolio.
ZenBusiness is a complete guided platform for entrepreneurs to launch, run, and grow successful businesses. We not only provide the tools to help entrepreneurs get their businesses off the ground but also customized step-by-step directions to master business ownership. As a part of our easy-to-use platform, we have one dashboard that centralizes all our products and services. With a phone, tablet, or desktop, aspiring business owners can file their business, set up a domain name, create a website, and take care of any legal paperwork needed. Once the business is launched, ZenBusiness stays with the entrepreneur as they run and grow their business. We offer services such as banking, payments processing, expense tracking, taxes, marketing, and more to ensure our customers are successful and can learn to be the masters of their own businesses.
Q. How have emerging technologies contributed to the success of your business?
The product team at ZenBusiness is focused on building the most innovative offerings for our customers, which includes staying on top of emerging technologies and trends. We know from our customers that having digital financial management is one of the biggest needs for starting a business. In fact, according to a ZenBusiness survey, three-in-four micro-business owners agree that access to easy-to-understand financial management technology would be a business game-changer. To help alleviate this need, ZenBusiness launched new payments and invoicing product features in August 2021 that simplify merchant services so entrepreneurs can focus on what matters most - running a successful business. The new features allow platform users to send and customize invoices, accept credit card and bank transfer payments, and manage their income, all within an easy-to-use dashboard across their mobile, tablet, and desktop devices.
Since the onset of the pandemic, ZenBusiness has experienced an explosion in customers, with over 170,000 entrepreneurs getting their start on our platform since March 2020. This rapidly growing population of small business owners needs accessible and worry-free financial products and services that stress running and growing a business. By providing fintech solutions, payments processing, and banking all in the palm of their hand, we are fulfilling that need and democratizing financial services technology for small business owners by equipping them with a full suite of business banking solutions typically reserved for bigger corporations.
Q. Do you have any new services ready to be launched?
ZenBusiness has many new features in the works to help our customers manage their business and track their finances. We are continuing to expand our in-app capabilities, build on the educational resources available to our customers, and provide the most seamless experience for our users.
Q. What does the future hold for your company and its customers? Are exciting things on the way?
The future for ZenBusiness is very bright. Our customer base is growing rapidly, and we are excited about what’s next for our users and our platform.
Meet the leader behind the success of ZenBusiness
Ross Buhrdorf is the Founder & CEO of ZenBusiness PBC. He has over 30 years of experience as an entrepreneur, technology leader and c-level exec, angel investor and board member, and has helped transform the way consumers interact with technology. As CEO of ZenBusiness, Ross is helping historically underserved small business owners start, run, and grow their companies through a single, comprehensive guided platform that provides all the tools they need to get their business off the ground and running. Prior to ZenBusiness, Ross was CTO of HomeAway (now Vrbo), a vacation rental site.