The one superpower SMEs have which they don’t use
Super speed and invincibility not included
Imagine the day after discovering fire, the cavemen decided to lock it away or forgot about it, claiming it was too dangerous, too new and too much about it was still unknown for it to be useful to their civilization?
Ridiculous, right? Yet, this is the same mindset many businesses have when we talk about remote work and decentralised teams.
It’s rather strange to see a small business or startup yet to adopt remote working in their strategy. Here in Nigeria, remote working is still a novel idea, despite being on the increase in many megacities around the world. It’s understandable that there’d be some skepticism to new practises in a region. Even though there’s not much to be skeptical about.
Technology exists to make our processes more efficient and our lives easier. New tech leads to new sociocultural trends and habits that sculpt the business landscape. We’ve seen this play out several times. Paper, email, smartphones, cloud technology, wireless internet, 4G LTE etc. It’s an established trend — once an innovation makes lives simpler and processes less cumbersome, everyone eventually gravitates towards it.
Remote working is simply the off shoot of the many tech and tools available today as well as the general business landscape in the 21st century. It’s not a matter of if but when. Time is all that separates the early adopters from the laggards.
The problem though is, by ignoring remote work or putting it off till later, small businesses rob themselves of their major advantage.
Their size.
Among their many advantages, SMEs can adapt and change on the go, as well as experiment and respond to the market faster.
There’s something to be said about responding early to the market. I still wonder what would have happened if just one telco had offered the mobile number porting option about 7 years earlier, long before dual SIM phones started showing up in Nigeria.
As a business grows, there are some necessary “evils” that come along with growth and success — more employees, bigger office space, exponential increase in emails and meetings. There’s more but let’s stick with these 3.
These three add ons get pretty cumbersome and eventually deny the business what made it successful in the first place — the scrappiness is gone, the lean and agile teams and the desire to experiment and respond rapidly to the market, nowhere to be found.
This should go without saying right? But it’s amazing how many businesses forget this once they start hitting it big. It’s almost as though, there’s an unspoken rule that, once you’re out of the woods and profitable, it’s time to become just another traditional business.
Luckily, some folks have realised this and created solutions to some of these “evils” I mentioned earlier — Slack is slowly replacing internal emails, early morning Standups are helping to curb meetings (even though the standup itself is still a meeting, albeit a quick one), and workspace sharing is slowly eliminating the need for huge real estate expenses.
But how do you fix the evil of being a big(ger) company? Well, one solution is to break the big workforce into smaller teams working on different projects, the same way the big tech companies do. NASA and Apple are examples that come to mind. For example, splintering off the marketing team, decentralising them, and making them a smaller, more agile team, may just be the boost a company needs to boost sales.
Truth be told, building a profitable business isn’t about bloated valuations and raising VC. It’s about delivering value faster, cheaper and responding to the market quicker and more accurately. That’s how you win a market.
Small businesses are better positioned to achieve this than the big players. It’s why the big corporations try to adopt the lean, startup model. Smaller teams, remote teams, flexible working hours are their attempts to mimic the startup structure.
True, not every business can be run remotely (restaurants come to mind).
On the other hand, there are thousands of businesses that need to be dismembered, rearranged and decentralised into smaller, more agile teams and structures that will increase productivity and efficiency.
Because at the end of the day, what increases your bottom line and brand equity is your ability to meet and satisfy demand. And being small makes you able to do this faster, cheaper and smarter.
Just as the mantra goes, Great things come in small packages.
Small businesses are just giant corporations waiting to happen
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