I’ve had a quite a few people ask me about how their “Big End of Town” experience translates to working with “Small End of Town” clients…

Or put another way, what happens when corporate thinking is applied to small businesses… is it oil and water or more like gin and tonic (meaning very compatible!)

So, I thought it makes sense to talk about the biggest differences I’ve seen between corporate and SMEs to see what you think!

OK here’s four of the biggest differences I’ve seen between corporate and SMEs…

1. Big end of town means lots of resources, well established revenue lines, systems for much of the operational parts of the business and they can afford salaries to recruit high calibre people for key roles… that’s def different to the small end where resources are limited so you need to WAY more resourceful. So, when you’re working with SME’s it just means you need to imagine that there’s likely to be ONE person putting into place the strategies you’re sharing, not a whole team… that’s a difference!

2. Corporate is also very focused on KPIs and the cycle of annual budgets, reporting for monthly board meetings, quarterly reviews for actual vs budget forecasts, reports and structured performance assessments. You’re basically under scrutiny the whole time… that means there’s a lot of information and access to information that you kinda take for granted in corporate. In SMEs you’ll need to dig for information because they just don’t collect or analyse it but in fact that’s one of the biggest areas where you can add value to coz when you get the info you need it makes decision making really easy…

3. In corporate there’s also relatively slow decision making and plenty of hurdles if you want to do anything new or perceived as risky. That means there’s a lot of reports and number crunching that has to support any new initiatives… again, very different. Small business will make a decision in a heart-beat and want it done the same day… so if you’ve ever been frustrated that the lag between idea to execution in corporate is glacial, you will love working with owners. They make decisions FAST!

4. Apart from that when it comes to similarities, it’s business so the principles are exactly the same… so every business needs to drive revenue, control costs and manage the overhead. So, all your sensibility about this is perfect… the only difference here is that you don’t have a specific person or department in charge of each area. That means you need to work on these things one at a time e.g. JUST work on cost controls until you get a result THEN work on driving revenue coz if you try doing them both at the same time it doesn’t work which comes back to my earlier point of needing to be RESOURCEFUL when you don’t have RESOURCES…

Quick summary…

If you love quick decision making… Small end of town EATS big end for this… you could double or triple client’s business whereas in corporate you’re sometime tracking inflation.

If you can think like an entrepreneur that lacks resources but has a heap of resourcefulness, then that mentality will work really well for you.

If you’re used to being able to find information and use it for helping to make decisions then again, this will serve you really well.

And lastly, if you’re great at prioritising what needs to be done and can sequence out tasks for implementation, then SME’s will love you forever.

Hope that helps?

What are some of the other similarities and differences you’ve seen…