Can small companies rival the Corporates?
many departments, separate sales and
marketing groups and development teams…
Business start-up planning relies on market research. Having identified competitors, your unique selling points for your product / service that you intend to provide, the commercial value to prospective customers / clients, the prospective market share that you hope to acquire as compared to the market share of known competitors. You have calculated how much capital you need in order to service a plan for growing the business, fulfilling its core objectives on the path to converting your first prospects into cash-flow.
Pretend that this was all achieved and you are still surviving on the initial venture capital or seed funding. As your business grows, your challenges are to reduce business costs, make efficiencies, and keep costs and expenses down.
All businesses have a need to react quickly to market pressures, to stay current. However, while competing for customers, you discover that some of your competitors are able to take advantage of the latest technologies, and in so doing, start to take a significant market share of available business!
Time is the common factor that touches most of these points?
The quicker you can compete, the more chance you have of getting cash flow before your competitors
Unless you can deliver all of these things yourself, you are going to need some help.
Partners – permanent / temporary staff – freelance contractors
Business choice: Contractors do not get emotional over product features, service offerings or favourite software technologies; if your business needs to pivot, hire a freelance contractor because they will come in, hit the ground running and take on any task you put before them. Generally, a contractor has their own tools, equipment, software licenses and insurance; they are good to go and are already set up to start working.
Business choice: Partners with complimentary skills can be a cheaper solution since they don’t need to be paid in the short to near term; however, partners are a finite resource with limits on how much development effort they can bring to bear on business problems. There comes a point in time, that in order to sustain growth, the business needs to take on extra people resources and invest in expanding their talent pool.
Market share: Ability to respond to market needs, speed of development, reduce the cost / price ratio for providing the service or product, actual or perception of quality, valued product features, word of mouth advertising and sales marketing campaigns…
Maintenance of Product Features and Unique Selling Points
The relationship between sales, marketing and product design and development are fundamental but human capital is key to solving these challenges.
Business choice: Permanent staff are a long term investment, we all know that hiring staff is not cheap, but the questions are: –
- Are permanent staff more effective or cheaper than freelance contractors in the short to near term?
- Can the work be completed with sufficient tenacity, to a good standard of workmanship and quality?
Good workmanship is related to experience; experience takes a long time for people to acquire. Similarly, experience takes a long time to foster and grow domestically; unless of course you buy in extra experience, by hiring the right freelancer who is willing to share their knowledge and expertise?
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