The Small Business - we grow too!

I was with a client yesterday in Oxford, started out very small - 4 people with the idea for a new technology in an old area - and now with funding, investment, energy - lots of energy - after 3 years they have 120 people, mostly scientists and they are going to grow very quickly. Why was I there - they need to export. Note the word NEED - the UK market isn't big enough for them!

Just a minute, haven't they read the press? Haven't they seen the news articles on how hard it is to get into export and how companies won't try because they fear failure or at least not getting paid on time? Don't they know how difficult it is with strategic planning, market research, needing skills you can only learn over years? Well, no they don't and to be honest they don't care.

That's not to say they are stupid, far from it - their management team work under AGILITY MANAGEMENT. Agility management? you might ask. Yes, if management plans need to change, change them, don't get stuck in a rut and not knowing about something doesn't mean they can't do it. They know they need help to export, and Strong & Herd LLP was called in to pull the strands together and make sure they don't miss key things as they sell to USA and China. Have they done market research, strategic planning - yes, but they wouldn't call it that. They know their products, know the markets, know their competition and have spoken to their prospective customers - they know their market edge.

What sparked this blog was reading something posted on LinkedIn a couple of months ago (I catch up eventually!), a link to a USA blogger and these words jumped out at me:

Strategic planning is inappropriate for small companies because:

• No time: They don’t have the management time or resources to invest in days of planning.

• Big cost: Because their top teams usually lead their sales efforts, taking them off the road has an immediate negative impact on revenues.

• Small payoff: The payoff of strategic planning is often measured in millions of dollars rather than hundreds of millions, so it makes no financial sense to overinvest in the effort.

• Short-lived: Smaller businesses must continually adjust their strategy so the strategies they develop during a strategic planning session are usually short-lived. They win because they are more nimble, quicker to seize unexpected opportunities, than their larger competitors. Long-term planning can slow them down and kill this advantage.

This doesn’t mean small-growth companies should fly blind. It means they should adopt an adaptive opportunistic approach to strategy. They should plan in the hallway, not the boardroom.

It goes on to say that what the smaller companies need is strategic thinking, not strategic planning - two key words "Why Not?" to out think the Competition, sometimes this happens just because you are new in the industry and don't know how it should work so do it your own way. Use IDEAS: Imagine, Dissect, Expand, Analyse, Sell. According to Kaihan Krippendorff who wrote the US blog the main reasons companies don't do something is because they think it costs too much, customers won’t like it or it’s not technically feasible without testing if it is true. He was talking about all business, but this sure seems appropriate to exporting.

Well, I met a company like this yesterday and believe me it works! Can't wait to see them win the Queen's Award for International Trade in 2013 - they will, you know, because no-one's told them they can't!