Here are several excerpts from a thoughtful article by Roger Trapp, Knowledge is Power for SMEs:
Some businesses are content to stay small. Many are so-called lifestyle enterprises, where the proprietors have made a conscious decision to stay small in the interests of work/life balance, but most – aware that in the current business climate it is impossible to stand still – are intent on becoming bigger. The obstacle they face is to retain that entrepreneurial spirit while becoming large enough to take on the bigger beasts. Here are a few tips to help them succeed.
1. Stay entrepreneurial but get some discipline – Identify the entrepreneurs – typically they account for only a tenth of any management group – and help them to do what they do best.
2. Promote communication – It’s all very well an entrepreneur being creative and flexible, but if he or she cannot communicate this to the staff, the business will suffer.
3. Make proper use of technology - The internet has made it much easier for start-up businesses to reach their market. On the internet, everybody is the same size.
4. Make sure that technology grows with the business – The sort of computing power that was once only affordable to the largest companies is now available to smaller businesses. Until recently, smaller companies were largely served in this area by other small businesses that took the technology offered by the largest providers and scaled it down. Now, the largest providers are targeting the growing business market.
5. Manage customers and systems - One of the clearest examples of needing to take a more holistic approach to technology is customer relationship management (CRM). Recently, many businesses have invested in CRM systems without getting any real benefit.
6. Get proper protection - Businesses need to realise that, in an increasingly sophisticated world, just having firewalls and anti-virus software is not enough.
7. Be smart about money - Another factor that has levelled the playing field between small businesses and larger ones is access to capital.
8. Focus on strengths and outsource the rest – One of the great benefits of being a small business is that the proprietor can concentrate on a small niche in the market and seek to gain an advantage over larger rivals by offering superior customer service or a very specialist product or service.
9. Keep up to date on regulation – Small businesses habitually complain about the amount of regulation with which they have to deal, particularly in relation to health and safety, and employment. Again, thanks to the internet, much of the worry can be eliminated by handing over responsibility to specialist providers.
10. Have a “tolerance for ambiguity†- In the end, entrepreneurs thrive by living on their wits. “A tolerance for ambiguity†is a phrase that Doug Richard, the serial entrepreneur behind the investment research company Library House, uses to describe a readiness to live in a chaotic world. It involves having a general plan about where the business wants to go but being prepared to seize opportunities as they arise. This attitude, allied with an ability to act quickly and a readiness to work harder than the competition, is probably what distinguishes the successful entrepreneur from the person with a good idea.
For more, be sure to check out the complete source article.
