Every entrepreneur dreams of growing their business from a small operation into a gargantuan multinational corporation. Naturally, the bigger and richer a business is, the more successful it can claim to be. However, growing into a large business isn’t all unadulterated upsides, there are some drawbacks to growing your business and some challenges involved in managing a larger business compared to a small, local one.
From the perspective of consumers, there are a number of reasons to want to do business with a local business rather than a mega-corporation. Here are some of the most important advantages that local businesses have over national corporations.
Greater Flexibility
One of the most significant advantages that local businesses have over their larger competitors is they are able to offer much greater flexibility in their services. Big corporations are generally managed from the top-down, there is little room for individual stores or managers to use their initiative. This forces them to take a rigid and unflinching approach to the way that they do business. This might be the best choice from the purely financial viewpoint of a major corporation, but it limits the quality of service that bigger businesses are able to offer their audience.
The greater latitude that small businesses have when it comes to their audience and how they treat them enables them to put forward a level of service that is impossible for big corporations to achieve. A large corporation simply has too many people and priorities to manage to be able to offer the same kind of flexibility in its dealings with its clients that a local business can.
Develop More Personal Connections
The personal touch counts for a lot in the world of business. If you can make your customers feel as if they are special and important to you then they are naturally going to view your business in a much more positive way. Despite all the money and resources that big businesses have available to them, they aren’t able to compete with their smaller local competitors when it comes to establishing a relationship between the business and its audience.
Small businesses will find it much easier to provide their customers with a single point of contact within their organization. This means that clients will experience businesses through individual people, instead of only ever coming into contact with their ranks and departments.
In most small businesses, there are significantly fewer layers in the hierarchy between frontline staff and the managers and executives that manage the business as a whole. This makes it much easier for communications to make their way up and down the chain at speed and reduces the distance between customers and executives.
More Streamlined Organization
Having a big business and all the resources that come with it at your fingertips can enable you to achieve a lot, so there are certainly some advantages to a big corporation. However, as a business grows, so too does its organizational structure. No matter how hard you try to streamline the structure of your business, you can only be so lean while also developing from a local business to a national corporation.
However, a local business with a relatively modest organizational structure can be more responsive and versatile. This greatly speeds up decision making and further enhances their flexibility.
Local Knowledge And Understanding
One of the most important benefits of using small, local businesses is that they can offer a level of understanding of the local area that big corporations struggle to match. A local trader who is intimately familiar with an area will know how to get things done, what routes to take, and any other useful information that only comes with first-hand experience of a place.
Local businesses are also more likely to offer services to clients out of hours. Big corporations rely upon their operations being consistent across their entire business. Having one of their local branches offering services that the rest of their network doesn’t is inevitably going to cause trouble. But a local business is much more likely to bend the rules and extend their hours to enable them to serve their clients out of hours.
For example, imprezait.co.uk provides IT Support Kent. As a local business that serves SMEs in the Kent area, Imprezait isn’t just offering a valuable service to locals – they are also offering it in a way that only a small, local business can. Part of this includes dedicated account management and ensuring that every client has a central point of contact they can turn to.
While it can be useful to have access to the vast resources of a big business, there are also circumstances where a smaller local business can serve customers better.
Being smaller and more agile enables local businesses to serve customers more efficiently and with a bespoke service if necessary.
