Jun 29 2007
Think big or be small
If you want to be a big business, you have to think like a big business. You have to act like a big business.
If you can’t visualize yourself being the best in the industry and not just a good as you can be, you will never find yourself as the industry leader.
Corey Smith is the Vice President of Innovation at Fisher’s Document Systems where he maintains a blog on business and technology.
Leave it to me to only reply when I disagree! I think the key to being big is thinking small. Not in terms of your potential (as your last paragraph alludes to), but thinking more personally. The beauty of small businesses is that you can know all of your customers, employees, and vendors. I think when companies get to the size that they can’t, then they lose focus on what got them there. Of course, the beauty of the web and social media is that a big company really can know their employees and customers. Maybe not as well as a little company, but certainly with some level of two-way conversation.
Thanks for the comment Justin. I think that you and I are talking about two different things. You need to have a small business mentality when you are dealing with your customers, but you need to be willing to have a division of responsibility in order to get big.
I had lunch yesterday with two collegues where we talked about the possibility of starting a web based business. In that discussion, we determined that one is to be responsible for the operations side of the business, one is to be responsible for the marketing side of the business and I am to be responsible for the technical side of the business.
Big businesses have a division of responsibility and no one in a successful, big organization wears all the hats. It is too hard to manage and too hard to grow.
All small businesses that want to get big have to determine if they want to stay stagnant and not grow because the CEO is designing marketing pieces and the sales manager is fixing the network or hire the right people to do that job and specialize a little.
That makes sense. I guess I was thinking more externally.