Small Giants – Bigger is not necessarily better!

Posted: February 8, 2016 by Robert Craven

Consultants, accountants, bankers and business schools like to tell us that companies that grow their profits and revenues year-on-year are thriving and if they aren’t doing it then they must be failing. Small Giants by Bo Burlingham poses whether growth is such a good thing. Bigger is not necessarily better!

One of the most relevant arguments for staying cold and creative, intimate and manageable

Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop

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Burlingham focusses on businesses that reject the pressures of endless growth and instead concentrate on creating a great workplace, amazing customer service, and a sense of community (both locally in the workplace); the most important thing is being the best at what they do!

‘Businesses with mojo’ have attributes that include:

1. The founders/leaders recognised that they had a choice about the type of company they were creating. Following their own strategy and not ticking boxes from the usual suspects.
2. They allowed themselves to question the usual definitions of success in business and to imagine possibilities other than the ones all of us are familiar with.
3. The leaders overcame the huge pressures on successful companies to take the paths they had not chosen and did not necessarily want to follow… and remained in control rather than letting their business be shaped by external forces.
4. They created an extraordinarily close relationship with their local community, with customers and suppliers, and in the workplace.
5. Due to being privately owned, they had the freedom to develop their own management systems and processes.
6. The leaders had unbridled, limitless passion for their service / product and business.

So What?

We all to often hear clients beat themselves up because they are not achieving year-on-year exponential growth…

• Maybe the growth lifestyle doesn’t suit them?
• Maybe their business strategy hadn’t incorporated growth?
• Maybe you don’t want to sacrifice all you have created to create a Frankenstein’s monster?
• Maybe there’s more to life than huge profits when selling your business?