“Small business” is just a government classification. Entrepreneurial businesses serving well-defined communities via creative specialization exhibit enormous economic productivity, energy and dynamism.
Such businesses can not be defined quantitatively as small, medium or large. They’re defined by their qualitative impact on their customers’ lives.
Entrepreneurial businesses care differently, and care more.
Big businesses must pay attention to size and scale, to their huge revenue and profit streams, to their many, many shareholders, to journalists and bureaucrats and financial analysts. They are, typically, managing to maintain progress or status on a well-established pathway, and have limited time and resources to devote to customer care.
The triple option of the entrepreneur.
Small businesses are designed and constructed to care for customers and communities. As Ramon Ray puts it, small business entrepreneurs choose to:
- Create what we want;
- Serve whom we want;
- Collaborate with whom we want.
As a consequence, business owners care differently about their customers, their colleagues, and their collaborators and partners.
Small business entrepreneurs create communities of fans.
Ramon sees small business owners serving their chosen communities as Celebrity CEOs (see Mises.org/E4E_93_PDF). This does not require millions of Twitter followers or a pack of paparazzi. It results from being known and trusted as the specialist supplier of a highly desired service personalized to a well-chosen, often local, customer base. It’s the deli owner with the best sandwiches, or the mechanic to whom to trust one’s 1958 Edsel.
Customers become fans, deeply emotionally bonded to the entrepreneur and the service. Business owners become more deeply intimate with customers-as-fans, and the synergy is complete and lasting. The entrepreneur and the firm come to fit the community perfectly, and become indispensable.
The well-served community is a qualitative measure of business success, not quantitative.
Ramon Ray aims to build a community of entrepreneurs along similar lines of helping and caring.
Entrepreneurs can thrive by serving well-chosen communities, and they can also thrive by being part of a community. His vehicle is a B-corp formed by fellow-entrepreneur Seth Godin, to support small business entrepreneurs. Akimbo provides knowledge, tools, and courses to help entrepreneurs run and grow a business. Ramon’s latest contribution is a series called Small Business Essentials, a workshop in 12 modules. The modules cover essentials including pricing, cash flow, and hiring, as well as entrepreneurial refinements such as properly defining what problem you are solving and who are you solving it for.
A special feature of the workshop is that participants are joined online by fellow entrepreneurs, so that there is a group experience, group knowledge sharing, and group Q&A. The community helps itself by helping each other. It’s a place to learn and a place to ask questions.
Additional Resources
“Celebrity CEO Mindset” (PDF): Mises.org/E4E_93_PDF
Ramon Ray’s “Small Business Essentials” Workshop: Mises.org/E4E_93_Workshop
Ramon Ray’s book, The Celebrity CEO: How Entrepreneurs Can Thrive by Building a Community and a Strong Personal Brand: Mises.org/E4E_93_Book
Full story here Are you the author?
Tags: Featured,newsletter
