Startups are young and formless for the first couple of years.
You may have a solid business plan and an operations strategy in place, but
there’s nothing confining you to those structures. Big corporations are forced
to keep their models the same to keep the board of directors, the investors and
their customer base happy. As a startup, you can do whatever you want.
This ability comes in handy when something disrupts the
industry, such as a new technological development or an even newer competitor.
Big businesses must absorb the blow and respond slowly as their massive gears
begin to turn. As a startup, you can turn on a dime and rebuild everything from
the ground up, if necessary.
·
TEAM CHEMISTRY
Some major corporations have casual atmospheres, but for the
most part, any big business, you walk into will be filled with walls, offices
and cubicles. The people from accounting don’t know the people from marketing,
and the CEO probably doesn’t know anyone below him/her.
In a startup, you have no choice but to bond with the other
members of your team. You may have three people or three dozen, but you’ll be
working so closely together on work that matters to all of you that you’ll have
a natural chemistry in your working relationships.
That chemistry matters more than you might think. It means your
workers will be more productive and more satisfied with their jobs, giving you
more reliable work and a lower turnaround.
·
LESS BUREAUCRACY
In large corporations, everything must be formalized. Every
minute process is well-documented, and there are rules surrounding everything.
Usually, when a decision is to be made, it must undergo rigorous evaluation by
multiple people in multiple department. In essence, the gears of bureaucracy
slow everything to a crawl and formalize processes that never needed formalism
in the first place.
While you might have some solid rules and formal processes in
place, your startup doesn’t have a fraction of the bureaucratic nonsense that
your larger competitors do. You can make decisions faster and work more
efficiently because of it.
·
COMPETITIVE PRICING
Pricing is a difficult issue to speak about broadly. Each
industry must consider different factors when it comes to pricing. For example,
in food product development, larger companies have a pricing advantage because
they have access to more equipment, they can do larger runs and save money on
items per piece. However, for most industries, startups have the advantage when
it comes to pricing.
Startups have less overhead. Because fewer people are using
fewer resources to develop products and services, they can be priced more
aggressively than those same products and services churned out by a multi-level,
massive corporation. You’ll also have more flexibility in pricing, open to
negotiation, so you’ll be able to secure more clients.
·
PERSONALITY
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, because startups have
fewer people within an organization, they tend to have a much better, more
accessible brand personality. The CEO has been just another member of the team
and makes appearances at most meetings, giving a face to the company. The
employees, taking a smaller salary and having more freedom, all actively want
to be a part of the company, so they’re happier and more fun to work with. Some
customers will naturally gravitate toward you because you are a startup. You’re
novel and you’re an underdog. People love that.
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