Successful startups are lean, fast-paced, focused on business results and often leverage on technology to level the playing field. Here’s how you can pick up their best practices, too.
By the myBusiness techblog team
It seems, with all the news of startups releasing successful products, that smaller companies are learning how to turn the tables on mega corporations and use their smaller size to their advantage.
Indeed, with technology, it’s easier than ever to operate faster and address a larger audience than the traditional small outfit could. But technology is just a piece of the overall picture. If you think of successful startups, a few characteristics stand out.
Lean, flexible teams
They are usually lean at the start, which allows them to move fast to capture any opportunities and are very focused on business results. They may start by targeting a portion of the market before expanding.
Being lean can be an advantage. For one, speed can make or break a deal, and SMEs are better able to capitalise on making fast decisions than larger firms. Rather than wait for a decision to be made after several meetings with people of all levels and departments, a small group of experienced team members can sometimes arrive at an intelligent, workable plan faster.
SMEs can operate on this principle by breaking up their teams into smaller, operational groups. This allows decisions to be made faster, with one or two members of top management keeping the various moving parts cohesive.
Experts in the domain
This ability to move quickly depends also on the level of experience and know-how in a team. Good decisions or ideas may come not from a large committee but instead from a handful of experienced experts in a small team.
These experts form the second pillar of a lean startup’s core: know-how. While working with tight budgets and a small staff may seem to limit the ability to take on large projects, this “weakness” can be balanced by angling your team’s depth of knowledge and expertise towards the market. Many SMEs can position their know-how to their advantage, to combat a larger competitor that may be able to provide breadth.
Be focused on your market
The size of an SME also means it has to focus tightly on a market segment, because of their limited resources. This allows SMEs to better identify segments of a market where its product or service competes the most strongly and has the best chance of success.
A small firm can also focus on a strategy that aligns all its product lines in a coherent, integrated manner. This can help cut costs and make one’s product or service appear more attractive to prospective customers.
Look at Apple. An SME it certainly isn’t, but it has always been singularly focused on its products. The marketing for its products – from the iMac to the iPad – is perfectly aligned as an extremely clear sales pitch to consumers. From the product packaging to the display at the showroom, the sales process is tightly controlled to the point of obsession.
Being focused, of course, does not mean hedging one’s bets all in one place. It just means concentrating one’s resources to deliver the best chance for success.
Use technology
Yet another way that startups often overcome the disadvantage of their small size is to leverage on infocomm technologies to level the playing field with bigger players.
Take cloud computing, for example. Large data centres used to be the sole domain of huge firms with the resources to access that. Today, players like Amazon, Google and Microsoft make these clouds available to all, and this has allowed some startups to hop on and harness that power.
Look at Splunk or Sumo Logic. You may not have heard of them, but these Silicon Valley-based startups crunch serious data every day. They make data analytics software which requires massive computing power to work, and the entry to the market would have otherwise been closed off to them if not for on-tap computing products.
For SMEs, you too can tap software on the cloud. Software tools that once cost tens of thousands of dollars to procure, for example, can be accessed through a pay-as-you-use monthly subscription model. You can look at the offices apps on the myBusiness portal for a suite of products that you can sign up for and use, without all the technical complications and cost of maintaining it in-house.
Coupled with the tools for the job, learning how smaller companies make it work can be a worthwhile lesson for SMEs to kickstart their operations to the next level, with a new boost of agility and focus.