Competing Against the Big Companies

It can be discouraging to be in a position where you have to contend with big companies in your field, and you’re just a small, struggling start-up. Big corporations are intimidating: they can buy you up out of petty cash, steal customers by beating your prices, and drop little bombs on your day like opening a new chain right across the street from you. What can you do?

Take advantage of your strengths, and build on them. These are a number of things which a small business can do that a larger business can’t.

For one thing, you can make your customers feel closer to you. A big business is impersonal and unwieldy, too large to take much notice of the individual. A small business is warmer; you get to know the proprietor and staff, always feel welcome, and can count on more personalized service.

Another strength you have is flexibility. Your business is smaller, and hence more nimble. You can respond to changes in your industry in a flash. Adopting a new software platform is a matter of staying late one night to install it on your desktop machines; big businesses need a month to roll something like that out. You can adopt a new product overnight; big businesses take longer to adapt to changes in the market. You can switch policies easier, without the inertia that plagues big businesses. They lag behind, because they’re dragged down by all those middle managers who cling stubbornly to the way they’ve always done things.

You have more passion. A big business is run by a CEO who usually never visits a branch or chain of their own business; they’re regally up in the clouds or in their ivory tower looking down on everything through a stock ticker. They don’t think about how to attract and keep new customers as much as you do. Instead, their commitment can be summed up as: “If it starts to lose money, I can always sell it and invest in something else.”

But your commitment puts you in a position of less choice; you have to make this work, and so you do. In almost every industry, the innovation happens on the small business front, with big business adopting the new practices only when they wake up and notice that the little guys are making money under their nose.

Utilizing your strengths is what running a successful small business is all about. By capitalizing on your strong suits, you can effectively turn that crucial corner of the market in your favor. The race does not always go to the biggest competitor.