In 1995 I moved from Dallas  to Los Angeles. Prior to the move my company The Right Source, produced marketing plans and the correlating collateral for execution. Large Fortune 500 were a substantial portion of our client base. Upon arriving to California with the intent of creating a firm more focused on strategy development rather than marketing collateral (and later adding financial management) I researched the corporate geography and was amazed to learn that 87% of the companies had 20 employees or less. Given this, I decided to focus exclusively on providing services to small and mid-sized companies. Having spent over a decade working with SME’s  I can now be considered an industry expert and have experienced many benefits from making the decision to pursue this pathway so long ago.

However, my enthusiasm  of such an alignment has not always been shared.  I have seen countless strategies, within both small and large companies that I have been involved with over the years, solely dependent upon the continued growth of the large companies, which constituted the bulk of their customer base. Working with the larger companies brought them proud recognition and they could boast having worked with some well known brand. I would constantly state the risk of such a limited strategy as it was becoming evident that the large companies were not expanding, especially in California where the number of Fortune 500 companies were declining every year. I would urge my clients to consider creating internal processes that would allow them to work profitably with the smaller companies. I feared that a continual “large company strategy” would lead to a survivalist situation where the amount of competitors would increase, which would eventually lead to margin erosion. This was a very hard strategy to push when times were good, but now, in the midst of a difficult recession many are realizing the need for a new strategy as they watch their beloved large corporate customer base  announcing huge layoffs and cutbacks.

While serving on a board of a well-known business school I heard a similar message. The school targeted the larger companies with tuition reimbursement programs not considering the small company as a target market. They even tailored all of their programs toward this type of executive  rather than engaging in an entrepreneurial program, as one of their competitors had done. Today many of their prospects have reduced or eliminated tuition reimbursement programs and employees fearing for layoffs do not want to take the chance of entering a program they cannot finish. Meanwhile the small company owner seeks further education to navigate the storm, which is evident by the interest in the classes held by Business Simply Put www.businesssimplyput.com as well as many of the extension programs.