Book Review – Small Is the New Big – Part 1

November 12, 2009 by yelena
Filed under Bookshelf, blog

I’m reading Seth Godin’s Small Is the New Big. It wasn’t something I planned on reading. Still, a few days ago I was approached by a client who asked to write a web copy for new site.

One of the things I ask all my clients to do is to list 3-5 of their competitors. The thing that I see over and over, and this client was no exception, is that most of the competitors are very large companies. And my clients are not. They are typically very small, just 1-2 part-time employees and the owner or a team of freelancers or just the owner herself.

In such cases I always advise against trying to emulate the big guys. It’s not even that trying to appear much larger than you are tends to backfire in the worst possible way at the worst possible time. It’s just I think there are unique advantages and opportunities in being small. The small size can be leveraged to your advantage. And so the book title caught my eye at just the right time, as I was in that same frame of mind.

Now, the book looks like a collection of blog posts. There is no narrative and no research apart from little tidbits mentioned occassionally in the individual chapters. And the chapters themselves are not really chapters. Instead, they are “riffs, rants and remarkable business ideas” presented, for no particular reason, in an alphabetical order. My impression of this book can be summarized in these words – heady, hard and hearty.

Heady as in the discussion of business accountability and Internet transparency.

Hard as in trying to really understand the concepts of zooming and cliff businesses and their implications for myself and my clients.

Hearty as in such no-reservations bits as “Clowns, Are You A?” and a short, but heartfelt “Opt-In”.

My advice is to take time reading this book. I can’t say that I had to stop after each chapter – some seemed of little interest or applicability to me. But I found out that I had to take a break, sometimes a pretty long one, pretty regularly (on average after each 5-7 chapters).

I needed that time for the ideas to sink in and be absorbed. Then again, I was under the deadline – 2 weeks before I’d have to return the book back to the library. So there was a certain sense of urgency and the need for note-taking.

So here are some of my notes:

Accountability – Seth’s idea is that Internet marketing rushed the era of anonymity and complete absense of personal responsibility, at least for the big companies and unscrupulous marketers. As I see it, it presents a great opportunity and an important competitive advantage to small businesses. Small businesses don’t have faceless call center employees, receptionists who don’t know every single person in the company, or sales people who only sell.

Wearing many hats has an important advantage – you personally get to interact with your clients a whole lot more and in many different situations. You really get to know them. You build real relationships that go beyond newsletters and season’s greetings e-mails. If something goes wrong, you have no cog-level employee to blame. That’s a lot of responsibility, but it’s also a perfect opportunity to stand out against big companies’ voice mails, corporate policies and inflexible standard operating procedures.

Benchmarking – Seth argues that benchmarking one’s performance against competitors leads to mediocre solutions. “What really works is everything being good enough, and one or two elements of a product or service being amazing“. This is very powerful. I see many business owners going for certain solutions or package deals because that’s what everyone (meaning all their competitors) is doing. That’s how they end up with websites and web copy that reads just like everyone else’s. And with completely unremarkable blogs and newsletters. Not to mention a stream of uninteresting, “grey”, status updates on Twitter. There’s this pressure to be everywhere all at once and do everything because we saw our competition doing this. Good old keeping up with the Joneses, business-style.

Hard work – how’s this for a new definition of hard work: it’s not about the number of hours you put in, but about the level of risk you take. Many entrepreneurs wonder why, with countless hours they put into their businesses, they see very few results. That’s because, and I do believe it to be true, we get a bit scared and a bit lazy. It’s really a lot easier to walk the long safe and level path than to take a shortcut through the mountains and the deep dark woods.

How do I know? Recently I was pushed (ok, strongly encouraged) to take on a project that I was too afraid to work on (I tend to underestimate my skills and knowledge). I did take on that particular project and boy did I work hard on overcoming my own fears and reservations. I ended up doing the project in half the time and with less of an effort I thought it’d take and my doubled my income for that month. Hard work, meaning taking on risks and getting over your fears, does pay off in a way that long hours never will!

Cliff Business – “if your product or service or your business is going to be nothing but trouble until it hits big, I think it’s better to pick something else to launch”. Ditto!

Competence – according to Seth’s definition is “having a predictable, reliable process for solving a particular set of problems”. What’s the problem with it then? Competent people avoid change and resist it whenever they can. What’s wrong with that? Their minds are closed to new ideas and opportunities. But how doyou explain to a client that hiring an “incompetent” VA (or any other vendor for that matter)? That’s hard work.

More is to come in the next part of this book review.

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