Everywhere we look big businesses are burning the midnight oil trying to look, and in some cases, be smaller than they actually are. At the other end of the spectrum us smaller businesses are tapping our imaginations hard trying to look bigger than we really are. What a farce! If we spent just as much brain power on developing new ways of doing business, being creative or creating a leading edge product, things could be a lot different!

As I’ve mentioned before, traditional marketing is over, thankfully. I was never comfortable with it anyway. Now the playing field is more level. Technology, the internet, mobiles and global inter-connectivity mean that small business can play with the big boys or girls! You don’t need a multi million pound budget to reach your customers. A few thousand quid will often do.

But what do we do instead, we act like big corporates when they grow and hit a certain age. Small businesses stabilise, systems rule the roost and ideas run out. They become boring, risk adverse and whilst the larger business usually has huge cash reserves to weather the storm, the small business doesn’t. In fact the small business should have just done the complete opposite, taken the risks, kept nimble, utilised its close team and generated lots of ideas that it could quickly take to market.

Our biggest and most aggressive enemy is complacency itself. Small business must not lose the character that made them successful when they first started up. They can easily be closer to the customer, better able to add value to the customer and have more chance of making creative decisions than big business.