Doesn’t matter what size you are
It matters what you offer.
Was meeting with a client the other day – a start-up. Very young but with many clients throughout the United States.
This company is getting ready to hit it big and they are concerned – once they get the next three clients, they will be recognized as a nationwide company and a force to be recognized with. What this means to them, they THINK, is that everyone (their competitors who are already huge and well-established) will copy them and steal all of their clients.
Here’s why I disagreed by using the following analogy:
There are hundreds of Analyst companies throughout the world, right? Jupiter? Gartner? etc. From firms that are thousands of analysts to firms that are just one.
Just one? Yes, just one.
Why? How? Because they specialize. They focus on a niche market. They become so knowledgeable about a single product line that a large analyst firm can’t come close to having the breadth of knowledge that the single individual has.
This is the same as my client. They will have knowledge and focus that their large competitors can’t come close to having, now or even in the far distant future.
The DANGER is to themselves, where they may start believing that they are so large that they no longer have to be so concerned, worried, or detailed oriented towards their clients – that is where they will lose their client base and go out of business.
As long as they keep focused on what they currently offer and keep offering that, they will last far into the next decade before they will have to start worrying about competition and hopefully, by then, they will be onto the next field of expertise.
