On Tap from the Pub

By Tom Field

Executive Summary:

Are your resources limited or just smaller?

Let’em laugh

You have a few trucks in your contracting business? Wow. You run a single restaurant off the outskirts of town? Swell. You just signed a five-thousand dollar contract with a local business? That’s nice. You hired your fifth employee…part timer? Okay.

None of those responses included exclamation marks, if you didn’t notice. But small business owners often hear the underwhelming reaction. Most small business owners don’t care, though. They’re not concerned if the measure of success for a retail operation is WalMart. They’re not jostled in the slightest if a new tech startup only gets angel investors if the promised return begins at $50 million.

The small business marketplace is served by men and women who do what they do right now, in the moment, with a product or service for a customer, using the resources they have. Some of those resources, are rather incredible or even on the verge of ridiculous, when compared to big business.

Some small businesses operate with decades’ old equipment. Some small businesses engage manual production rather than automated. Some small businesses—as we learned this year— adjust and implement difficult measures just to survive, while the big business right next door to them are allowed to operate with negligible changes.

In the Guy Ritchie film The Gentlemen (2019), when thugs burst in Rosalind Pearson’s office, she picks up a small, gold two-barrel derringer. The bad guys laugh at the “paperweight” pointed at them, until the first one advances toward her. We hear a pop that’s not much different than the sound an electric stapler makes. Thug number one feels the tiny red blood spot in the center of his forehead, and falls dead backwards. Followed by thug number two.

In the right hand, with smallish, limited resources, you can still accomplish exactly what you want to accomplish.

I see this happen all the time. And it makes a better story.