I’ve spent a significant amount of time in both small business and big business environments. And the over riding conclusion I’ve come to is this:
Big Business is about the small picture.
while…
Small Business is about the big picture.
While it seems unlikely, this irony is true for most of the people involved in either scenario. Big business due to their success and size split the tasks up into tiny little pieces. “Mary is responsible for new product development of our fat free, individually wrapped, cheese slices for the South West region”. The people become cogs in a machine that is so big the world becomes obscured. While in startups and small business we are responsible for, well everything from customer complaints, to invoicing, to media interviews.
So before we transition from big business into a startup, it pays to pay attention to the big picture because all too often when we ‘grow up’ working for big companies we lose sight of the real world we operate in.
