What is it with us that we are so easily impressed by the size of company someone runs? Perhaps it scares the heck of us that a company of that size is managed by a guy/gal we know. It is one of the common myths in business to size up the company by the number of employees working for it. Bigger is better and more impressive.
If you have a conversation with someone and he/she asks you: How big is your company?
Your reply might be: I have over 100 employees.
The response you would get might be – Wow, nice!
You received a form of compliment.
If, instead, you answer – I have 2 employees.
The reply might be different – Oh, that’s nice.
Just said to be polite. Not impressive at all.
However, in reality the bigger is not always better. Sure, there are cases where it really is. But it also creates unnecessary drag. For this reason alone, quite often, big companies would prefer to be smaller. Does your small company strive to get bigger for wrong reasons?
There is another thing with big companies – quite often they are disconnected from their end users and don’t entirely understand their needs.
I have example related to this in our own company – we’ve been making income just from using disadvantages of Microsoft (and a few other companies) products and filling the needs of real users in our software like yDecode and OE Classic. The thing is that the gaps we’ve been filling with our software had existed for decades and nobody in large companies ever took notice. Fixing the gap in their software would require maybe 50 lines of code – if they could notice it, that is.
That is the difference in agility of a small vs. large company. Think of small company as a small motor boat while big company could be a large cruiser. Obviously each one is better for their purposes.
What I propose here is neither of those two. The idea of perfect sized company doing work the most efficient way possible is my idea of a perfect business. Find the right size for you and stay that way. Maybe it is 5 employees, maybe it is 250 and maybe it is outsourcing the whole thing without any regular employees. It’s your choice to determine which size is perfect for your company.
So next time if someone asks you how many employees you have – be proud with your answer and don’t care about their reply. After all, you do have a business and you took responsibility of your life by running it. You’ll miss the simplicity of doing business you have now, when your business becomes big. Or even better, find the perfect size for your company and stay that way.
