We’re all familiar with economics of scale, those insurmountable plateaus of time, money, and market reach. Without certain levels of market share, small businesses find it hard to get beyond their small sphere of influence.
But new industries and service providers have emerged, to give small businesses the benefits of economics of scale, without them having to actually expand to that point.
This leaves small businesses to stay small and efficient, with a few employees and low overhead. But these same businesses can look big when it counts, having all the benefits of a much larger scale than they actually possess.
1. Get the basics right
No matter how small you business is, you can still project the professional image customers expect from any other business. If you are in business, make it a business. You don’t have to spend all your resources trying to expand when you don’t have to. It’s now way cheaper to build a better image of any business.
Rebrand your website..fast. The first point of contact for most people is a business website. Your business website should be one of the best marketing tools you can use to sell your services or product.
Stick to company specific emails at all times. Create an email address with your domain name and communicate with your company email address. Since email is a primary communication tool, your email address must represent you professionally.
2. Consider a virtual office (if you can’t afford a traditional office space)
One of the best ways to do this is with virtual offices. Virtual offices aren’t what they sound like on paper. There’s no computer monitors, no conferencing, no green screen. It’s just a real brick and mortar office, available for lease in more than 140 locations around the world. Virtual offices provide you the best opportunity to work in an physical office without the cost of a full-time physical office.
A virtual office can give your team a professional appearance. Most of them come with a variety of styles, sizes, and capabilities. Your virtual office can be opulent and modern, even if your home office is much more simple. Whatever your needs, you can have the best technology available in most virtual offices, without having to pay the the full cost.
3. Don’t take customer communication lightly
Brand care specialists represent a new generation of the old-fashioned call center. Gone are the days when your call center just answered the phones (and did so badly). Today’s best call centers handle customer communications wherever the occur – over the phone, email, your website, or any of your many social media portals.
They talk to your customers just like you would, having taken in every aspect of your company culture. They can also help you handle recruitment and training. Whatever your needs, you customer communications can be in the big leagues, even if you business is working its way up from the minor leagues.
4. Take advantage of big data to make informed decisions
Another great way to have the appearance of a big business, whatever your actual size, is with the benefit of incisive data analysis. Big Data is what allows online retailers to make the consumer experience truly dynamic. Remember your last customer interaction at the Web’s Biggest Retailer? You would have been offered many items, all compatible with the item you are interested in, at great prices – items you probably hadn’t been considering before logging on.
This is the essence of dynamic pricing – the right product at the right time at the right price. Smaller retailers don’t have the billions of data points at their disposal that mammoth retailers do. But a new generation of data companies provides it to them, in order to price with insight and purpose, just like the world’s biggest retailers.
There are many ways to enjoy the advantages of smallness, while taking advantage of the economics of scale. Make these a part of the way you do business, and see the way it changes things for the better.