[JohnFen]

One of the best pieces of business advice I ever got was that a small business has advantages that a large business can only dream of. Ignoring those advantages and instead trying to act like a large business acts means that you're not playing to your strength and are instead playing a game that the large business is likely to crush you at.

If you're a small business, lean into being that and you'll have a much larger chance of success. Don't try to pretend that you're something you're not.

[TheNewsIsHere]

That is a challenging balancing act, although worth it to work on mastering.

Technology is a particularly difficult place to balance those things.

When we opened our small business we took the marketing approach that (not the exact pitch) we “bring the best of enterprise” with the “agility” of not being an enterprise.

We don’t market like that anymore because it’s not a good fit for small business customers, but we still have a focus on that idea internally.

Balancing that with the realities of a small business are hard. For example, we have internally managed 3-2-1 backups of almost all customer data, replicated geographically, and persisted with credentials that can’t also mutate backup data. That is somewhat time consuming to manage on the front end.

I’ve written on HN before about how we suffered with QuickBooks and eventually moved to an ERP. Most businesses our size would scoff at that, but some things are worth the expense to integrate various processes into a single pipeline.

Part of the problem for SMBs is that you can’t scale your humans like you can scale your servers. So for every hour I spent connecting the dots, sending DocuSigns, and fighting with QB was an hour I couldn’t spend on product/service/customer. Sometimes you can buy your way out of that. Sometimes you can engineer your way out of that. Figuring out which is which is one of the hardest parts.

[JohnFen]

> we “bring the best of enterprise” with the “agility” of not being an enterprise.

If I read "best of enterprise", I'd wonder what was meant by that.

Broadly speaking, one of the big differences between large and small companies is what they're good at. The old saying that "small companies make it possible, large companies make it inexpensive" holds as true as always.

[TheNewsIsHere]

For us the meaning was market specific. We provide application hosting and consulting. Many of our customers came to us from other firms that clearly were run by people who did not understand the basics that an enterprise would expect. An example of this would be backups.

We had several customers jump to us from another local firm. When we got in, we noted that the prior firm had “implemented backups”. This was a script that just made a zip file of their data and stored it right alongside the running application. Sometimes even in a web/network accessible directory. But hey, most of our customers didn’t have backups before they came to us at all.

We’re also talking no MFA, guessable passwords, customer domain names owned by accounts associated with email addresses that no longer existed, etc.

So, stuff like that. I guess to sum it up you could say “we pay attention like an enterprise should,” and that many SMBs in the space don’t, for clients that don’t know what to pay attention to at all.

> The old saying that "small companies make it possible, large companies make it inexpensive" holds as true as always.

I hadn’t heard that. Love it. We don’t come cheap, but our clients don’t have to manage S3 buckets, and we don’t have to run geographically redundant SANs.

[iambateman]

When you think about those advantages, which ones seem most generalized to all small businesses?

(Of course many advantages will be unique to a particular industry or business)

[pier25]

what are those advantages?

[dghlsakjg]

Not GP, but flexibility and adaptibility is huge, as are personal relationships.

[JohnFen]

Yes, exactly those.

Plus the ability to do extreme pivots on a dime. Also, you tend to get treated a little better generally as you aren't an impersonal corporation. You're a businessperson, with the emphasis on "person".

[voxl]

That was a long-winded way of not saying anything of substance.

Tautologically all business (big versus big included) are fundamentally different, and hence have different strengths and weaknesses.

Hence, it is not a priori true that the category of small businesses has unique advantage (as a category) over big businesses. You of course have done nothing to argue that they do.

[yamazakiwi]

It's a good point of comparison and common trap businesses make. They are pointing out that exclusively acting like big corp as a small business could lead to missed opportunities.

You basically dismissed someone for making a fair comparison because they didn't give you a concrete example like: A local coffee shop remembering customer names vs a large chain with a impersonal script.

Giving an example in this way is not a requirement, you can use your brain as well. Unless you just didn't read what they typed thoroughly enough and mistook their point.

[cogman10]

This is true, but really the original comment was pretty abstract. It could literally be boiled down to "Small businesses and big businesses are different. Play to your strengths".

[yamazakiwi]

It might seem vague or rudimentary but it is a common occurrence in business. We can take the conversation deeper now if we'd like, If you don't feel the need to expand on the idea yourself or feel the poster didn't set you up to do so, that is understandable.

I think it's interesting to talk about how "act your size" can also be wrong. Sometimes fake-it-til-you-make-it is the goal. Contextually you should hold both ideas to be true and apply them appropriately.

Maybe you just thought the original post is a vague platitude and you don't want to give them the satisfaction but maybe we can share some of what we've experienced.

One thing I always think about is hiring generalists vs struggling to maintain departments you can't sustain. I understand businesses think this way, so it influences how I think about applying to roles. I'm currently in a generalist role and when searching I always look for smaller businesses because I find my impact is higher, and repetitive work is my greatest fear.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

> it's interesting to talk about how "act your size" can also be wrong. Sometimes fake-it-til-you-make-it is the goal.

And sometimes they can both be useful at the same time. A while back I was contacted by a Fortune 500 company to build them some custom hardware. I'm the proverbial "one guy in a basement" so I could respond quickly to change requests without having to go through multiple meetings and their engineers appreciated that.

OTOH, as we got deeper into it, when I realized that they were planning to do most transactions by Purchase Order, I was really concerned about scaring them off by telling them I was really just one person, so I very quickly spun up an LLC in an attempt to look larger, at least to their Purchasing Dept. At the time I didn't realize that you can get an EIN (Employer Identification Number) while being a Sole Proprietorship, but creating the LLC just took a few minutes on the state Attorney General's site anyway.

[JohnFen]

> I think it's interesting to talk about how "act your size" can also be wrong. Sometimes fake-it-til-you-make-it is the goal.

This is a really interesting point, I think.

In my opinion, it depends on what your larger goal is. If your goal is to eventually become a big business, that changes your approach and "fake it till you make it" gains some validity. In a sense, those sorts of businesses are less "small businesses" and more "large businesses in their infancy".

[brokencode]

You’ve also not added anything to the conversation. Instead of a snarky response, you could have asked for some examples of how small businesses have used their small size as an advantage. This may have led to insightful and constructive responses.

[sorcerer-mar]

That was a long-winded way of saying “I didn’t read your comment very closely at all.”

[replwoacause]

This exchange is headed for peak HN territory

[averageRoyalty]

Have to disagree there, champ. This comment is now peak HN, as we've entirely derailed from the original topic but are still arguing about something with polite but arrogant undertones.

Also here's a link[1] to an article tangentially related to what I'm saying. I haven't read or, nor will you. It doesn't quite confirm what I'm saying, and it's possibly behind a paywall.

1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37068695

[HeyLaughingBoy]

"... and I'm in a mood to be unnecessarily argumentative."

[vjvjvjvjghv]

One example:

- A small business can live very well on delivering a product that makes a few hundred thousand dollar profit. Large companies can't be bothered with such small numbers so they don't even try.