Competitiveness and Competition. Now most sectors are saturated and its highly unlikely that you can start a business today and be the only one in that industry, sector or niche market, especially if you are a small business. In most cases small businesses are trying to offer about the same service or product that big multi nationals already offer or sell. So how do you become and remain competitive?
How do you even get to deal with competition as a small business?
An interesting question isn’t it?….and it’s not an easy one especially if it’s a sector that is that is quite attractive to players of different sizes. Why? because the larger players have got scale, human resource capability and the financial muscle, so then what are the typical advantages that an entrepreneur or a small business has got n such a situation? Its agility and ability to be nimble. So how do you take advantage of that.
Ability to move quickly and easily. Business agility is the ability of an organisation to: Adapt quickly to market changes – internally and externally. Respond rapidly and flexibly to customer demands. Adapt and lead change in a productive and cost-effective way without compromising quality.
Agile Business- Stratagem Inc.
Use your Agility
Let’s give an example, when you go to a large business and you want to place an order, you have to go through certain procedures; but if you go to a smaller business, you give them a call now, a the few minutes later you will have it. So speed is critical and that’s often an advantage that smaller businesses have because they don’t have bureaucracy or shouldn’t have bureaucracy.
The other thing to bear in mind is, ‘yes’ the market may appear saturated but especially when there are, very large players or in some instances monopolies, the challenges that those have is one around the fixed cost.
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Large companies have fixed costs that are at a level which a small business is not yet at or shouldn’t be at. So, think on how you use your cost advantage to either deliver the same good or service at a lower cost or perhaps in a slightly different manner with out compromising the quality of your good or service, maybe at a faster, quicker to get to the market. .
There are many big businesses that are in a particularly space and it’s not cost effective for them to be dealing in certain parts of their business, you can take over that bit of their business and ride on the brand and reputation of that larger business.
Often, a business small business comes in very competitive, doing very well, but the orders start flooding in and all of a sudden it falls apart. How do you guard against that? It is about thinking ahead and making sure that your business is ready to carter for that growth, that when it happens, you’re not surprised.
Final thoughts
So yes, it may appear the market is saturated but opportunities are always there, you just have to keep your eyes open and then look at what distinguishes a small business, what critical advantages do you have?
Speed, agility, ability to make decisions quickly, responsiveness and all of those put together but again as you start to grow in this is goes back to the earlier point that we had, you have to make sure that your structure matches your growth stage.
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