3 Lessons Small Businesses Can Learn from Corporate Giants

Having had the pleasure of working in Corporate America; operating my own small business; and now working with other small businesses through my latest venture, InfoTactixx,  I’ve come to realize there are a few things large corporations do better than us, small business owners (gasp!)

Here are three pages we should take out of their corporate handbooks:

Lesson 1:  Live by Process Improvement

How they do it:

Corporations devote a significant amount of time to improving their legacy processes. Operations managers master the art of process improvement by understanding and re-engineering functions that fall into two categories: 1) Manual in nature (therefore, inherently risk-prone) and/or 2) Take up an excessive amount of an employee’s time.  Processes that fall into these categories are either completely done away with or vastly improved.

How we can do it:

As small business owners, we all have tasks that could use some improvement, but we’re so swamped with everything else that we don’t invest the time to think of a better way of doing those tasks.

Process improvement doesn’t have to be complicated. It could be as simple as creating and leveraging MS Excel or Word templates to cut down some time in a process. Think small and you may be surprised what you come up with.

Lesson 2: Invest in Technology

How they do it:

Corporations don’t become massive by having their employees do every task manually. Instead, they invest in building a technical architecture that can support their business processes in order to build scalable organizations.

How we can do it:

As small business owners, we must invest in a decent technology infrastructure. In order to grow our businesses, we should be spending less of our time on non-value add tasks, and more of it on focusing on strategic efforts (increasing our client base, getting the word out about our projects and services, developing strategic partnerships, etc.)

Just as process improvement can be accomplished with little-to-no money, so can technological improvement. Often, the two concepts go hand-in-hand. Whether investing in out-of-the-box software, cloud computing or hiring an affordable system developer, we should look to improve the technology we use to support our businesses. You don’t have to spend a lot to make a big impact on your business.