Beat Your Business Competitors

1. Be Consistent
Larger companies have more workers and larger departments.  While an expansion of labor enables larger outfits to take on more clients, it doesn’t always improve levels of performance or consistency, especially in keeping contact with clients.

Smaller businesses beat larger competitors with consistency.  Make business interactions reflect advertising and marketing promise.  In the end, customers aren’t buying a big or small brand; they’re buying desired goods and services.  Whoever delivers most consistently, often wins customers.  Size is irrelevant to consistency; for example, many privately owned coffee shops thrive in the same cities or blocks as larger chains.

2. Be Early
The web allows consumers to rove for desired good and services in an accelerated fashion.  Consumers are becoming more accustomed to limited wait times between purchase and delivery, emulating the instant gratification of brick-and-mortar shopping.

Boutique shops outwit larger-scaled competitors by delivering goods on the same day.  For example, smaller outfits, such as the Lenstore, offer same-day delivery.  Being earlier than larger competitors is a way to win customers.

3. Keep Contact
It’s difficult for large enterprises to allocate executive time.  Customer service departments handle customer requests, technical difficulties, and complaints.  While dividing duties is a benefit in many ways, keeping direct contact with customers, whether through phone, surveys, or in-person interaction, helps maintain relationships and ongoing consumption.

For example, many small delis compete with larger grocers; while the delis’ prices may be higher, people pay the extra prices for the compensation of personalized service and a friendly atmosphere.  Those who shop at larger grocers often are not known by name nor personally know the owner of the chain.

4. Value Team
At its inception, each business, regardless of how large it gets, starts small, with one person or an intimate group hosting an original idea of the brand, operations, and internal development.  The people provide the core and original vision of the business.

When a corporation gets larger, the vision is maintained by slogans and mission statements, and provided to newly-hired people, but often, the process dilutes the original vision.  The value of the team and core lessens over time.  The boss who knows and sees team members each working day has an advantage over CEOs who employ hundreds to thousands of people they never see.  Often, the CEO suffers turnovers or terminations with little personal knowledge of situations, yet the small business owner keeps a keen eye on internal teams.

5. Be Humble
Before the dawn of industrialism, many small business owners existed, those fixing shoes, working with leather, shaping wood, etc.  Industrialism accelerated processes, enabling businesses to produce goods and services at a greater rate; however, though money grew, the quality placed into artisanship and work did not always.  In some cases, the humility of providing something of value gets lost during the pursuit of money.

Small owners with humbler growth aspirations have an advantage over larger corporations with high projections (and sometimes) unrealistic expectations from investors.  While every business needs money, business hosting humbler projections can defeat larger foes with growth projections, which are better a better fit for fairy tales.



Source: http://www.smallbusinesscan.com