If there is a single industry sector in which one expects to find microbusinesses — other than professional and technical services, that is — it is probably the information technology sector.

Part of the reason for that is has to do with the sorts of Heroes of Capitalism myths and stories with which we Americans like to surround ourselves. Some of our favorites among those stories — Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft, Dell — start with the feisty little entrepreneurial startup that began its life in somebody’s garage or at the kitchen table or in the college dorm room.

Another part of the reason why one expects to find plenty of microbusinesses in the information technology sector is because of the nature of the business. Information technology firms, for the most part, sell products of the mind. As such, they are the natural home of the Kings of the Intangible and the Queens of the Low Operating Costs, otherwise known as the American microbusinesses.

Such a microbusiness is Future Filing LLC, an information management software company headquartered in the metropolitan Chicago area.

The story of the inception of the business, as told by founding partner N’Gai Cobb, might sound a bit convoluted to many small business researchers and economists. It will sound fairly normal to the rest of us.

Ten years ago, Mr. Cobb was employed by a health maintenance organization and he found that many health care providers seemed to have trouble taming the paper blob beast. From that, he got the idea of starting a consulting firm to help those health care providers get their paperwork and files under better control in order to make their offices less costly and more efficient.

Interestingly, he ran the idea past a co-worker, who seemed to think it was a good one but who lacked the entrepreneurial drive to act on it. And so, the idea came to nothing. But, a few years later, Cobb approached another of his co-workers named John Byrne and, this time, the fellow he approached had enough of that intangible whatever-it-is to help Cobb make the idea into reality.

The consulting business started out as a “side business” — “not even part-time, more like quarter time,” Cobb says ruefully. Eventually, the company took on more clients and made more money and, when the partners saw the viability of the venture, they finally took the full time plunge.

As they continued with their consulting work, they found that fundamental back office document management in physicians offices was “a wreck.” Further, they knew that the medical document management software currently on the market was prohibitively expensive for a small physician’s office. So, they hired software developers to come up with an affordable small practice software solution.

The result was an information management and security product called KIXZO. Eventually, they realized that their software appealed to more small service providers than just those in the medical field, and they expanded their market to include small firms in general.

The firm currently has two full time employees, along with the two original partners in the venture and, in typical microbusiness fashion, everybody does a bit of everything. Their revenue goal for this year is $200,000 in sales and, provided they can find the equity capital they are currently looking for, the hope to increase that to $1.5 million in sales over the next year.

Which means, as you can see, that Future Filing is not the typical only-so-much-and-no-more microbusiness, when it comes to growth. Cobb is not as dismissive as some I’ve talked to about lifestyle businesses and his reasons for wanting to grow his organization are practical; he does not feel that his company can get the sort of product and market research they need from part time or contract help.

On the other hand, Cobb sounds very like the typical microbusiness owner when he is asked about his biggest business challenge.

“Not having enough time,” he told me without an instant’s hesitation.

When he is pressed on the subject, it comes out that Cobb is engaged in the never-ending task of educating himself on the critical matter of marketing, a business discipline that Cobb says does not come naturally to him.

And where have we all heard that before? More often than not, microbusiness owners know quite a lot about their product. What almost all of them say they need to learn is how to sell that product to its target audience. In fact, it is identified as a top issue for microbusiness owners often enough that the business management education community should probably sit up and take notice.

That said, it is interesting that Cobb does not mention the possibility of hiring an in-house marketing specialist to take that task out of his own lap when he discusses his plans for expansion.

N’Gai Cobb and his company are, perhaps more than anything else, a stark illustration of the dangers of applying stereotypes to one’s thinking about microbusinesses. His part-time consulting side business was just the sort of venture that might have been written off as a hobby by many in the small business research community.

At the same time, Cobb and his partner are setting revenue goals and looking for investors to grow their firm along a more traditional trajectory that is perhaps typical of microbusinesses. Still, the growth they are looking for does not spring from a love affair with money.

For Cobb, it has to do with answering what he sees as a deeper calling, to start and build a business, to succeed or fail on his own rather than because of some faceless senior manager’s bad calls.

“I wanna see what I’ve got,” says N’Gai Cobb.

And we all understand that impulse, don’t we?