Keep an eye out for emerging weaknesses
Small business owners have less recognition, smaller budgets, smaller bargaining power and must charge higher prices. These are all weaknesses when compared to larger competitors.
Many small business people see growth as their pathway to success. Many want to have bigger companies, confident in the notion that if they were only bigger they wouldn’t have the weaknesses they have today. That’s true, but while some flaws go away, others emerge to replace them.
Bigger businesses have just as many problems as smaller companies do. Sometimes larger companies have more problems than smaller firms. Sometimes bigger companies have bigger problems.
Growing organisations:
- lose their nimbleness
- lose their family feeling as teams and individuals grow farther apart
- have a smaller proportion of skilled people interacting with customers
- get fatter – and, therefore, slower
- become less focused on what made them successful
- lose touch with their clients, and
- allow their experience and accomplishments to slow their speed to innovate
You’ll never be able to mitigate every weakness, no matter how big you become. Instead, find leverage in recognising your emerging weaknesses and offset them with strengths.
Rod Solar is the Director of Practice Development Consulting of LiveseySolar, a healthcare marketing and sales training company. Rod has created successful and engaging training systems for over 25 years. His advice routinely generates 6-figure incremental increases in income for his clients by teaching them how to systematically improve customer service while increasing sales at the same time. His training offers an elegant (and fun) step-by-step conversational approach which benefits surgeons, practice managers, hospital staff, and non-medical staff working in private healthcare settings. Rod wrote and delivered the Business Development, Clinical Governance and Medicolegal Issues module for the University of Ulster’s Postgraduate Diploma in Cataract and Refractive Surgery (Theory) - PgDip. He is a regular presenter at the European Society of Cataract and Refractive Surgeon’s Congress Practice Development Programme and has regularly published articles about healthcare marketing in The Ophthalmologist, Optician, European Ophthalmology News, Cataract & Refractive Surgery Today, Eurotimes and Independent Practitioner Today. Rod has been a professional salesperson (B2B and B2C), management consultant, college lecturer, an industry leader, and executive coach. His clients include Optegra, EuroEyes, ZEISS, Moorfields Private, London Vision Clinic, Thiele, and many other high-quality, private Ophthalmology clinics from the UK, Europe, USA, Canada, and the Middle East. Rod has a degree in Psychology and Human Performance from UBC. He lives in London, UK and you can follow him on Twitter: @rodsolar.
