Mary Schmidt Marketing Troubleshooter

I’m climbing up on my “Small biz can beat big biz” soap box again today, after reading Tom Peter’s recent post, Scale Limits: “Built to Last?” Intel is decentralizing, re-branding, bla-blah, yadda-yadda. And so it goes all too often in Corporate America. HP’s CEO recently got kudos for centralizing again. It’s the standard “Plan Panic” method. Don’t know what else to do? Change the organization structure! The furious activity can buy you six months or so with Wall Street.

I know and work with many small businesses (that’s just about all we have here in New Mexico). All of which have inherent advantages over the big boys/big boxes/chains; but only if they chose to see it (and act) that way. They are much closer to the customer; don’t have to wade through umpteen levels of bureaucracy to make a simple change; and they can turn on a dime (if they can just get that dime in time!)

One of my favorite old Dilbert cartoons well illustrates this. The subject is the differences between small and big business. In the first panel a fella comes dashing into the manager’s office yelling, “Ralph just fell into the thousand gallon soup vat!” Big company response: “Quick! Let’s form a committee to study the issue and do a report.” Small company response: “Quick! Relabel the cans ‘extra-chunky!’”

Questions for you: At what point do companies lose their ability to relabel the cans? And, should small companies even want to grow past a certain point? When does the innovation (and fun) stop?

Entrepreneur Sanity checkpoints: One of the questions I ask would-be entrepreneurs is “How big do you want to grow?” Follow-on question: “Why?” This gets us into the discussion of quality versus quantity (of life, product and service) and all the reasons they want to start their own business in the first place. Net-net:it’s perfectly okay (and often preferable) to focus on a niche versus trying to be the next Google (or Wal-Mart or Starbucks.)