Would you feed a seven-year-old boy weighing 50 pounds the same dinner you’d give a pro-football linesman topping the scales at over 300 pounds?

Of course not. And the same is true for providing cloud services to your clients.

Channel partner say the kind of cloud, or level of cloud service, that’s right for your client will depend to a great degree on your client company’s size.

“When you deal with the different levels of company — from enterprise to medium to small — each one is completely different,” says Mike Aquino, director of cloud services at Cetan Corp., a Chesapeake, Virginia-based provider of cloud, collaboration and workload-automation solutions. “They’re all moving to the cloud, but they’re moving for different reasons.”

To be sure, most benefits of the cloud can be enjoyed by organizations of all sizes. These include cost savings, flexibility and scalability, and a shift to pay-for-use fees. Yet small companies have perhaps the most to gain by moving to the cloud, and in some ways, they are also the easiest clients with whom cloud providers work.

For small businesses, the cloud provides cost-effective access to technologies that, in the pre-cloud past, they simply couldn’t afford. For example, Richard Cummins, CEO of ISOCNET, a Crestview Hills, Kentucky-based channel provider, says the cloud lets him “take a small mom‑and‑pop shop that’s got one, two or five users, and give them enterprise-class solutions.”

Take Microsoft’s Office 365. It gives small-business users anywhere/anytime access to the familiar and reliable Office applications from their PCs, Macs, tablets or mobile phones — plus a generous terabyte of data storage per user. “With the cost savings,” Aquino says, “a company with 10 people can have the same capabilities that a Fortune 500 company has. It really motivates them to move forward.”

Moving a small business to the cloud is quite different from moving a company with 100, 1,000 or 10,000 employees. Mainly because the typical smaller business lacks its own dedicated IT department. “We have to do both sides,” Aquino says. “We sell the cloud. We put it in. And then we help them learn how to use it.”

Further, many small businesses turn to the cloud as an alternative to replacing old, end-of-life equipment — or as a quick fix for intermittent downtime. While those are perfectly good starting points for your discussions, smart channel partners say they needn’t be the endpoint. “By the time we’re finished talking, our small-business clients see a lot of other benefits,” Cummins of ISOCNET says. “They see the benefit of having a more redundant environment — not only having less downtime, but having no downtime.”

What about security? It remains the top worry for small businesses considering a move to the cloud, and a top reason for not moving. Aquino offers a way forward: “I look around their shop and start checking off things that are not secure. I show them what it would cost to make secure. Then I tell them that if they go to the cloud, that’s already done. You don’t have to pay extra for that security.”

So, when designing and selling cloud solutions for your clients, keep their size in mind.