Small Business – The chips are on the table.

I have regular meetings with big companies in my effort to finding strategic partners to sponsor our OnlineOffice for small office and home businesses.

While having these discussions we talk about the future and how business is developing in this economic downturn, and what business will be like on the other side. What often shocks me, is the fact that some of these guys do not realize that what they are seeing currently is a fundamental shift in business dynamics.

Today, more than anytime before, business is changing. More and more of it will be online and being big is no longer a guarantee to survive. In fact I believe that many mid-size and large corporates are using this economic downturn to justify massive redundancies, while the real reason is often top-level management failure of the past few years, long before this recession.

This means for small business, the opportunities are out there, you just need to look for them. This may very well be the best time to start a business, the evidence shows that businesses started in a downturn are stronger and survive better.

The chips, …. all the chips are on the table and are looking for takers. What are you waiting for.

5 Responses to “ Small Business – The chips are on the table. ”

1. Leaflet Distribution
   
   Said on May 12th, 2009 at 10:41 am

   All comes back to one basic fact, if you keep your fixed costs as low as possible, you are far more likely to survive, or even grow, than if your costs are higher, its not rocket science !

2. Jason Holden
   
   Said on May 12th, 2009 at 1:31 pm

   I couldn’t agree more. I would go further, many of the bigger business are going to suffer from the speed and innovation that smaller business possess.

   Right now I am glad I am a small business and not part of something bigger, just look at all the well-known brands that have gone/are suffering.

   The rub is, small business still needs a lot of help and guidance to get them to the point of taking on bigger business, they need access to funding, advisers, tender opportunities etc.

3. Stefan Töpfer
   
   Said on May 13th, 2009 at 8:33 pm

   Keith & Jason,

   Good points guys – bigger businesses should partners with smaller businesses to get the economy going again.

   Stefan

4. Leaflet Distribution
   
   Said on May 14th, 2009 at 10:36 am

   Going on form the point Jason made about the number of large brands which are suffering or even ending, it does make you wonder if these businesses would have finished anyway, one particular long established business that ended that I am thinking of, was such an out dated business model, who shopped there, a large variety of basically nothing to be honest, other stores, probably more recent, just jumped on the band wagon of other businesses, had huge retail outlets and as such huge fixed costs only to realise that the market that they entered was not as big, or was not growing as much as they thought, with the result of doom, seeing a successful business model and copying it, most of the time does not work, we see it day in day out.

5. Cala dOr
   
   Said on May 15th, 2009 at 10:42 am

   Every so often in life there are events that sort out the good from the bad, this is obviously one of those times.

Leave a Reply

I would love to hear from you, please let me know what your take on my blog post is. In order to stop spam on my blog and increase conversations, I had to implement some simple rules:

1. Please enter your real name, not your company, product or service's name.
2. If you enter your URL, your name will become a link to the URL.
3. We may send you a confirmation email to check you are a real person

We are sorry but any violation of the above rules will mean an automatic removal of your comment.