Four Things That Startups, Small Business, and Large Brands Can Learn From Each Other

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What Startups and Small Businesses Can Learn From Large Brands

Startup cultures are known for having a lot of drive and ambition. Their employees are passionate, and often have fantastic work ethics that are recognised and used to propel the company forward towards growth and success. 

If your business is going to compete in a big pond, you need to do your research and reflect on how larger companies have achieved their success. Here are some of the things a start-up or small business can learn from large brands. 

One: Focus On Employees

As a small business, you need to focus on your employees early on so, so this becomes a core value of your business before it starts to grow. If you can build a culture that appreciates, celebrates, and empowers your employees, then you will have an easier time scaling your business. You’ll have a staff who are motivated, and who will work hard to grow your company. 

At a startup, employees often end up working long hours to get the company off the ground. Management must make a healthy work-life balance part of the company culture to make sure that your employees don’t burn out in the early days. 

Invest in top talent. This doesn’t always mean hiring the person with the most experience, but instead means seeking out those who are most driven, with the right skillset, and values that match yours. 

Large brands often find it easier to focus on employees, as they already have processes in place that make running the business more efficient to run. Startups can learn from this to better manage their staff. 

Two: Establish Processes To Ease Stress

The first phases of a startup can be chaotic. There are a lot of tasks that need to be done, and it can be tough to know where to started. Often, companies just start on the product or service they plan to offer and get it out to the public as soon as they can. When this happens, they often forget to focus on the business and operations themselves. 

Large brands will have properly documented processes in place that guide all operations within the organisation. This helps the company to stay on track, but also works to bring order to potential chaos. 

Small business should do the same; document critical business processes from the beginning in order to better organise the company. This reduces stress and frustration as changes arise. 

Three: Know Who You Are

Having processes and procedures in place helps you to organise your business, and helps a newer company to define the kind of business that they want to be. 

A big company has had time to build a strong personality that people identify with. They have a clear idea of who they are and who to target. Small businesses should do the same. 

It’s important to remember that you don’t need to be everything to everybody. Trying to accomplish this is actually detrimental to a business, and is a waste of your time. Know what you’re good at, and who you’re good for, and lets those strengths shine. 

Four: Invest In Technologies

Many small businesses work with very small budgets. Despite this, you need to invest in technology that can help you to make your processes more efficient and scale your business more easily.

Big brands understand that you need to use technology to streamline operations if you’re going to grow your business effectively. If you’re a small family business, you might be able to manage your paperwork by hand, but what happens when your business doubles in size? You need to be ready to innovate and embrace technology that streamlines your work to give better client experiences. 

Small businesses might aim to keep technology to a minimum in order to spend less, but you need to make your decisions based on where you want your business to go, so your tech can scale alongside it. 

A lot of small companies don’t have the time or budget to research the systems that would best support their business. It might be a good idea to hire a managed service provider who can manage all your IT operations for less money than it would cost to have an IT expert in-house. 

Having the right tech set up can save you time and money in the long run, and let you concentrate on other areas of your business. 

What Large Brands Can Learn From Startups and Small Business

In the world of business, smaller companies often look at large brands to learn from them to help them to grow their business. While there’s no doubt that small businesses can learn from large ones, there is plenty to learn the other way too. 

When large brands take a step back and look back on when they were a startup themselves, they may be able to notice some valuable learnings. Here are some of the things that large brands can learn from startups and small businesses. 

One: Spend Wisely

As businesses grow, so do their budgets, and the desire to spend money can become more mindless. Sometimes, brands with a lot of money at their disposal can find an excess of cash a negative thing. 

Think like a startup when it comes to your finances. Spend money in the most efficient way possible, whether you’re investing in new equipment, hiring top talent, or rewarding your staff with a retreat. Do your spending habits line up with your business goals? All the purchases you make should make sense for your company. Don’t spend money just because you have it. For example, if your construction firm needs a new fuel transfer pump, don’t automatically buy the most expensive one if all you need is a hand pump (like these: https://gpi.net/product-category/pumps/hand-pumps/). If your marketing company has a large budget, don’t overlook free programs that might do just as good a good job as expensive premium versions. 

As your brand grows, take the time to audit your processes. Think like a small business, and make sure your priorities are right and stay aligned with your goals and the company culture. 

Two: Don’t Forget Who You Are

Large brands can easily get caught up in the day-to-day operations and forget the passion that they had in the early days of the company. As years of operational changes, stress, pleasing investors, and turnover go by, many businesses can lose their connection to the goals and values they originally had. It’s important to remain a sense of your roots and to remember why you started your business in the first place. 

If you can keep the passion alive, big brands can keep energy in the company, and their employees will be motivated to keep the company growing. 

Three: Take Risks

Startups take risks because they need to if their company is going to make it to the next level. As a business grows, however, there is a lot more at stake, so a company can become a lot more averse to taking risks than they were at the beginning. 

As a business grows, it’s easy to become stagnant. Processes have been set up and everyone follows the rules of the organisation. Big businesses may forget to keep working on their business as they keep growing. Evolution of business requires taking a certain amount of risks. 

To keep taking risks, a large business ought to test all businesses processes and get rid of anything that is not working and change it for something that does. Just because something has worked for you in the past doesn’t mean that it will continue to work as well for you. Continue to test out new processes, procedures, and technologies, to make sure you stay on your toes and continue to improve.

Four: Focus On Employees

As a large brand carries on scaling and growing, what often happens is that the main focus shifts to getting results and making stakeholders happy. If this is allowed to happen, company culture and employee satisfaction can begin to suffer. One of the most important investments that any business can make is in their employees. A business cannot exist or grow without their employees, so you need to make sure that your are taking care of them. 

No matter the size of your business, there is something that you can learn from the businesses at the other end of the scale. Make sure whether you’re just starting out, or you’re a household name, you’re always willing to learn and make changes to your business where you need to carry on growing, to remain successful, and to maintain your vision of why you wanted to start running a business in the first place. Always be open to lessons from businesses who do things a little differently to the way you’ve done things in the past, and be open to adjusting any areas of your business that are no longer working for you.