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Is Small Beautiful?
By Marc Tracy
New York Times small business columnist Paul B. Brown has collated several pieces of advice from the blogosphere that together add up to the same thing: small business owners, both generally and especially right now in this dismal economy, should embrace their very smallness and even be wary about growing much beyond their current sizes. In fact, Brown suggests, some entrepreneurs would not be wrong to find their businesses too large and decide that now is a good time to shrink.
Brown marshals points from every angle: financial, customer service, and work-life balance considerations all point to the advantages of smallness. A smaller company may have fewer employees, but those employees (rightly) feel a greater stake in the business; a smaller company may have fewer clients, but it can devote more time to them and thus make more money off of them--a more efficient model. A smaller company involves the entrepreneur in a greater share of the transactions, which is among the top competitive advantages of small businesses versus large ones; and a smaller company gives the entrepreneur greater leeway to decide where work ends and personal life begins--which for many entrepreneurs was a major reason why they decided to strike out on their own in the first place.
Brown's implicit larger point is that if you're going to run a small business, you may as well run a small business. In other words: there are advantages to being small, and there are advantages to being big. If you can grow while maintaining the advantages of smallness, then great. But, with few exceptions (and they do obviously exist), you're not going to grow into a big business: you're only going to grow as a small business. And if you do so in a way that sacrifices some of the small-business advantages while necessarily not gaining the advantages of the big guys, then you are liable to find yourself in the no-man's-land where otherwise solid businesses go to die.
Comments (0)January 6, 2009 1:51 PM
