Difference between a small business* and a startup, how to cross over.

Why only one leaves the garage, what we can copy from tech businesses.

Delegate

Small businesses* normally rely on the proprietor’s entrepreneurial talents, such as if someone does good knitting, they will start selling sweaters in the neighbourhood, they will normally receive orders on their phone or in person and personally organise the delivery, payment collection, etc.

Startups start similarly, but they quickly find other people or tools with the skillset, or train them, this enables a larger production base to grow.

Small businesses* should similarly replace tasks with affordable tools such as Marketing, Ordering, Fulfilment, with tools(typically free software like MyFy) to free up the entrepreneur’s time to concentrate on growth.

Scale

This follows with no mention, local businesses normally serve a geographic proximity such as the town, but with free e-Commerce tools, the potential for growth normally expands and challenges to uphold a higher Customer Care standard compel inevitable growth.

Brand

Differentiate your product to build customer loyalty. Rationally, there would be no compulsion for a customer to specific order from your shop, when they know the same Nike shoe is sold in the other shops on the block.

Branding can start with packaging, customer care, and grow into creating custom products.

Customer loyalty

Cultivating a customer relationship, can start with texting them holiday wishes, discounts. The argument towards this is usually that most business don’t recycle customers; a customer only buys a product X every 12 months, but even with this frequency, if you record, when the customer last purchased, and schedule an ad for their next purchase anniversary, you would have at least one customer returning every month because they don’t all purchase the same months.

Therefore, recording the last purchase and contact is always a positive, which is de facto, for customers who make orders for delivery.

Blockers?

Normally entrepreneurs are outcompeted in large market place, but we believe this is a Marketplace problem;

The nature of the popular e-Commerce models like Amazon, where the entrepreneurs will only supply the product and most likely get out-competed when product demand grows.

MyFy leaves control to the individual entrepreneurs, they manage their stock and relate directly with their customers which builds their business skills and transmits the scale of growth to direct success for the business.

References

* Just for the record, we think the word small businesses is limiting and we only use it in the colloquial sense to mean the current scale of the business.