BIG as ****!
Rich Turner
ゴジラ
Your Big Idea, hatched lovingly in to your Thing, slithers away in to the ocean deep. You bite your nails, spend all your waking hours fretting about it. In the abyssal profundity it feasts generously on the nourishing radioactive soup of initial sales, and slurps mightily on the isotopes of growing brand awareness. Suddenly, one calm morning, its dorsal fin crests above the surf, and onlookers gasp in awe as your errant Thing resurges…as King of the Startups!
A monstrously good beginning. Or? But how did this happen?
You developed a product — Check.
You found customers — Check.
You expanded beyond just you — Check.
Now there’s payroll, the start of delegation of responsibilities, actual schedules that mean you have to be somewhere at a certain time to…meet…and…discuss something. “What’s the agenda?” That unnerving day when you realize you don’t know everything your people are doing, and you have to start loosening the reins? “The Horror, the Horror!” you gasp in Conradian alarm.
The wearing of many caps is startup fun for sure, but what’s in store? Catapulted forwards on your success, it’s tough to understand how you may actually wish to structure your achievement. If the prevailing sentiment of the times is ‘grow your small business’, ‘build a fast-growing business’, and ‘get out of startup mode’, then isn’t the #1 mandate to ‘get BIG as ****’ as soon as possible?
Let’s back up a second. Before you do anything, operationally it makes total sense to check a few mental boxes:
- Hire good people you trust.
- Focus on what you’re good and happy at.
- Also focus on your customers. Listen to their feedback to reduce risk hugely early on. Free!
- Face forwards, and be ready to roll with the punches so you can adapt.
Ok? Feel good? So what’s next?
Wee / Klein / Small / Petit / 小さい
Well, plenty of small businesses are doing great, while remaining…small. ‘Main Street’ companies are now 53.1% comprised of the little folk. And we’re not talking leprechauns. That percentage means businesses of up to four employees total. Let’s take the ‘craft revolution’ as an example. This is not something that will wither and die off soon. It’s simply focussed micro-trends that are indicative of a greater mega-trend of deep yearning for ‘real stuff’, empowered technologically via ubiquitous information access. Craft beer, artisanal bread, ‘hand-cut’ sandwiches (please, how else would one prepare the noble repast?), bespoke tailoring and probably ‘hand-thrown’ pottery…we are searching for a connective thread between the origin of products and what their story means for us. Despite the somewhat episodically douchey nature of such product descriptors to our collective lexicon, it’s all just a knee-jerk reaction to decades of mounting mass-consumerism and diminished personal involvement in commercial interplay. The act of trade is an experience intrinsic to humanity, and the quest for human interaction once more within that simplest of daily tasks is one of the stories of our times. “They gurrrn took urrrr traaade!”. Maybe people just want to trade again on their own terms?
The point is:
“Small is beautiful”
The eponymously titled book by E.M. Schumacher talks about the human tendency for ‘pathological growth’, and how the only direction we know seems to be ‘big’. Play any endlessly addictive world building game and you understand the thrill of constructive growth. However, now that we are all functionally mobile, we need to address the fact that any growth structure is vulnerable to that mobility. Big Business loves ‘agile’, ‘lean’, and ‘nimble’, but Godzilla, or for that matter any enormous Unicorn born of our ‘idolatry of gigantism’ (nice one Schumacher!), is hardly fleet of foot now, are they?
As a slight digression, let’s be cognizant of the fact that, as cities grew from metropolis to the necessarily more grandiose megalopolis, our nomenclature for companies has similarly evolved in step. If you thought our elusive, noble, and rainbow-****ting $1B valuation friend the Unicorn was a rare sight, then it’s possible that equine commercial evolution will soon present us all with the Decacorn ($10B) and the immeasurably leviathan Hectocorn ($100B).
It’s all rather corny, to say the least. It does however illustrate our need to adequately deal with the concept of ‘big’. And the bigger the beast, the harder it falls. In fact, the risk bubble associated with such massive businesses, once burst, may even leave the financial detritus of ‘dead unicorns’ in its wake!
Human Scale.
Small, profitable businesses are generally run on human capital. That’s to say financial/accountancy services, realty, the ‘home-starter’ stuff that lets you commute in your pyjamas and never to an office. Great news for the service sector. Hurrah!
However, technology has driven positive winds of change for all of a gig economy or entrepreneurial bent. Aren’t we all starting to move in this direction anyway? Being super flexible, informatively proactive, and open to multiple income streams that can both enrich your bottom line as well as diversify your potential to fire up the neurons and be your creative/intellectual self? We live in a wonderful time, People, and jumping on board opens up countless opportunities to let the world experience your human self! This, therefore, is also human capital, as it expounds upon the term as more than just economic utility. It’s an expansion to the many ways we can now convert our individual talents into economic, societal, or global benefit through the assistance of technological connectivity. Not a Keynesian unit of measurement!
Let’s say you start your Idea, club together with your besties, and find that you have a solid group of fused talent. You inherently understand each other, respect your strengths and weaknesses, and couldn’t imagine not plugging in to that same vibe in your work everyday. Success in terms of growth can mean necessarily losing some of that vibe, as the core group will become stretched across responsibilities, departments, cities, and continents. The greatest challenge of big companies is how to retain their early culture, the flavor of excitement that bred such creativity. Of course it is.
So what are the major upsides of being small?
Time — owning your own. Watching a clock circle round to 6pm, then cramming in everything else you need to do to be sane is, well, insane. Sure, running your own gig will suck up a LOT of your time, but at least you can mold it to your life where needed, not the other way round.
Job Security — hahaha. What’s that now? Guaranteed paycheck, end year bonus to pay for vacations, and a golden handshake you say? Different world now. Given the uphill climbing involved with corporate laddering, and the sudden performance-related cuts, there’s no better era than now in which to strike out and create your own security instead. And let’s not even talk pension. That’s just French for ‘bed and breakfast’.
Decisions — tossing in some risk makes it all feel so…alive. If you’re making (or co-owning) the decisions, then you can also figure out how you value yourself instead of pandering to somebody else higher up in a political structure. “Oh I feel so underappreciated!”. Consign this to corporate history!
Humanity — all the above come out the wash as a big win in your personal humanity. Being your Idea/Thing/Brand, walking the walk and talking the talk, it adds up to a Big Deal. Time, security, and risk ownership all make those steps you take feel like your own. Perhaps you won’t be strutting around like Godzilla, but maybe there’s a little of the uncaged animal in there. It makes me recall Godzooky, Big G’s nephew. I carried his plush toy around with me as a kid and enjoyed his human-scale moxy.
Whatever your vibe, while you’re small enough to have open horizons you should take the time to figure out what’s in the game plan for your business. Since the start of the century, the average new small business size has dropped from 6.5 to 4 employees, and given that the number of these outfits is set to grow from 30M to 42M in the next ten years, something is making sense for people.
Tech the High Road
One trend is for sure, that however bewildering the commercial decisions may be, getting your business up and running and then operating it is becoming a more logical affair. Tech is not a panacea, but it sure does improve our access to services that help us consolidate business functions, do the numbers, communicate with customers and even sell products. Emphatically, it’s about road testing and finding what works best for you. You may need to discard many until you find your nirvana, but this is time well spent. If you can make tech truly work around your needs, while you’re fully mobile and doing what you need to get **** done, then you may find that staying small and nimble is really possible for your business. It may actually feel like the only option that makes any sense.
I would love to hear your stories. Whether it’s how you want to scale the heights to Unicorndom, or just keep it solo or mildly tribal. However it jives, how do you keep the human touch in your Thing/brand/service?
