The competitive advantage of smallness in a sucky economy

Posted on | October 13, 2009 | 2 Comments

Sales guru Jeffrey Gitomer, in a recent weekly column, wrote:

GREAT NEWS: This economic situation has created the greatest opportunity for small business in the past 100 years. You have the opportunity to topple, or at least outsell and outserve, the giant of your choice. While they’re busy cutting everything, guarding “shareholder value,” and their employees are guarding their desk and their job, NO ONE is guarding their customers (AKA: the lifeblood of their (and your) business). Is that cool, or what?

There has been so much doom and gloom in economic reports from hither and yon that a lot of people seem to have forgotten that some of the best times to be a microbusiness are the time when the overall economy is a quivering puddle on the ground, with the Big Boys quivering gelatinously right along side it (or inside it or something equally incestuous).

Jeffrey has a neat-o nifty list of ways to out-do those quivering Big Boys and nab a bit of their market share while they’re not looking. Most of what’s in it are things that most of us have heard before, so I have no need to repeat it.

So, I’ll just say: “Go read it!” Remind yourself that you are probably in better shape right now than General Motors (even without a government bailout) and that now is not the moment for you to be either timid or frightened.

What policy makers are referring to when they talk about small businesses leading the way out of the recession (whether they realize it or not) is the fact that small businesses are more agile and better able to get aggressive about picking up the slack during the sorts of economic crises that cause the Big Boys to busy themselves with staunching the bleeding.

I would add one more thing to his list, of course: Out-bootstrap

It’s fairly easy to sit around and moan about access to capital, particularly right now. But you waste an awful lot of time that way. If at all possible, learn to do the things you need to do to capture those neglected customers with bootstrapping. Internal financing and alternative financing are the ways to go right now. It’ll get you where you’re going a lot faster than waiting for the banks to decide that it’s safe to lend again.

Running a small business or a microbusiness can be a truly wonderful thing, if you are inclined to see the many positives — and that’s true whether your ultimate goal is to build an empire or not.

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