Small Business Competitive Advantages

Size matters, but sometimes being small is the advantage.

1. Flexibility
Being a small business means that your business strategy or focus on delivering various products can change easily. So if a customer asks for a specific request or if there is an emerging trend, small businesses are more posed to pounce.

2. Understanding Your Customer
As a small business your proximity and interaction to the customer is a close. Often the owner, founder, or manager works directly with some of the customers and gets a better understanding of what they need. Without piles of hierarchy in a business, all of the employees become better at customer service and when changes are made to the product/service, they truly benefit the customers.

3. Speed to Market
With flexibility and an understanding of your customer, small business is well equipped to get new offerings to the market....fast.

4. Low Overhead
With fewer employees and smaller scale facilities, there is less risk involved in the overhead and the opportunity to be cost competitive.

Besides these advantages, with changes in technology and various service offerings, many of the advantages of being big are disappearing. Such as;

- Procurement Quantity Discounts
With websites such as Alibaba allowing for easier international procurement and the efficiency of logistics increasing, the playing field is not as wide as it once was.

- Resources Available
Partnerships and leveraging sub-contractors can make a small business seem (and provider expertise) larger than it is. Leveraging resources outside of your company that adds customer value simply makes it easier to compete with the larger organizations that would have all of these resources internally.

- Marketing Budgets
Social media and online marketing is levelling the playing field with even micro companies or individuals receiving widespread awareness through these tools. No longer is a multi million dollar marketing budget required to get results.

Next time that you are worried about not being big enough, get creative and figure out how to take advantage of your smaller size.