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"Certainly, we are
trying to preserve all of that culture, and get the advantages of being a large
company with a broad product line, with stability, worldwide presence, great
support, and yet have the
advantages that a small software company has."
~
Bill
Gates
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Advantages a Small Business Offers To Its Customers
By Dave Wendt1 |
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Empathetic
Marketing
→
Selling Is Problem Solving
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Personalized
Customer Relationships: Small businesses have a genuine
concern for customers and an understanding that business is about
relationships.
-
Customer
Service: Small businesses
care about their
customers and have the ability to handle customer complaints and
concerns immediately.
-
Responsibility
and Responsiveness: There is no “passing the buck” when
it comes to small business. Small businesses are responsive and able
to make immediate decisions to meet the requests of their clients.
>>>
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Growth Categories
of Small Firms |
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 Jack Welch:
Behave Like a Small Company
→
Jack Welch,
the legendary leader of
GE, believed that
small companies
have huge
competitive
advantages.
They "are uncluttered,
simple,
informal.
They thrive on
→
passion
and ridicule bureaucracy. Small companies
grow on good ideas – regardless of their source. They need everyone,
involve everyone, and reward or remove people based on their contribution to
→
winning. Small companies
dream big dreams and set the bar high –
increments and fractions don't interest them."...
More
Customer Care
"There is only one boss. The customer. And he
can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by
spending his money somewhere else," said
Sam Walton.
→
Sam Walton's
10 Rules for Building a Successful Business
Sadly, many
mature companies often forget or forsake the thing that made them
successful in the first place: a customer-centric
business model
They lose
focus on
the customer
and start focusing on the bottom line and quarterly results. They look for
ways to cut costs or increase revenues, often at the expense of the
customer. They forget that
satisfying customer needs and continuous
→
value innovation
is
the only path to
business success and
sustainable growth. This creates
opportunities for new, smaller companies to emulate and improve upon what
made their bigger competitors
successful in the first place and steal their
customers.
→
Customer Success 360
That's why large corporations keep trying to
design
business processes that will give them the
customer-service
advantages they once held as small businesses...
More
Lessons from
Konosuke Matsushita
"The bigger the organization,"
→
Konosuke Matsushita,
Founder of Panasonic, believed, "the harder to
improve its efficiency. The organization where efficiency is the most
difficult to improve is the government. It's not that public servants don't
work hard; it's that the environment they are part of prevents them from
working hard. Surrounded by conditions that obstruct their efforts, the fall
into an attitude of pessimism."
Large companies, he felt, have the same
problem. Small enterprises would soon be out of business if pessimism set
in, and there is much more freedom of initiative and activity. Companies
with 20 to 50 employees enjoy a responsive, personalized environment in
which it is easy for each person to understand the personalities as well as
the work being done by the others.
Matsushita felt that such companies could attain 120 percent performance
from their employees.2
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