Author: Bo Burlingham
Synopsis |
Small Giants (2005) works on changing the focus of companies from growth to greatness. The author Bo Burlingham claims that limiting space and employees rather than growing exponentially can work efficiently for many small companies. Expansion and unlimited expansion are not always the right options to go with. |
Detailed Summary of Small Giants Book
The Small Giants Book deals with the basic tactics to allow your small service company to succeed and succeed. By considering these factors, your company may not make its way to the fortune 500 list of the best businesses in the US, but it will surely create impact, become great, and foster many connections.
This book will teach you how to improve connections with your employees, foster long-lasting relationships with your customers, better the quality of your product, and earn great prestige for your company.
The author shares exceptional alternative approaches to make the company successful with conventional strategies. He emphasizes that the company should focus on how to make the workplace better and more pleasant for the workers and provides excellent customer service.
In this book, the author demonstrates how we can redefine our values to keep our company powerful and successful.
Small Giants Book Key Points
Businesses have always worked according to the following principle: The more connections, the more products, the more outlets, and the more expansion equals more success and revenue. But in this book, Burlingham sheds light on another way of growing your business.
He advocates the smaller your company the more ‘giant’ or ‘huge’ it can become. In these key points, you will learn why and how!
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There is less or No Compromise
If your goal is to expand your company, you will compromise on everything, not growth. All the big business labels emphasize growing their businesses. If you observe it closely, in order to grow, these companies sometimes compromise on their standards or devalue their customer’s opinions.
Have you ever looked at a shirt on the rack of a huge international brand and thought to yourself: “why would they make it? Who is going to buy it anyway?”
Well, tons of other people may have looked at that shirt and thought the same. The truth is they are not valuing what looks good in the eyes of the majority of the customers. They are making a product that can earn them more. By selling one of those shirts, they might be able to make more than they would earn by making something that looks good to the majority.
This is the growth mentality that some huge businesses have. If your goal is to make your company huge but small, you won’t run after numbers and money. You will be compromising on less and certainly not compromising on quality.
Benefits of Running a Small Company
So many factors contributing to forming a good company call be easily applied if you are not constantly thinking about numbers. A small company means more control. The employer gets to know every employee closely and personally. This enables him to harness everyone’s strengths to their fullest.
The employees are also heard, feedback from every individual is considered, and they work with more zest than a worker who feels lost and taken for granted would. This also helps the company to earn a good name and reputation among its local community, and the local community, in return, becomes the biggest advertiser of that company.
Employee Retention and Healthy Workspace
These companies tend to keep lesser people on the team so that they can find diamonds in the dust. They do not need to hire people because they have a lot of branches. They hire people for their talents and then treat them with respect.
The working environment is kept healthy and motivating. The more the team feels cared for, the more they care about their product. Consider the example of Zingermans Deli, where all the employees feel taken care of and hence care about the qualities of food that their competitors might be ignoring. For example, making sure their food tastes not only good but also smells good.
These employees think they are the customers, and this mentality helps the company excel even more. Many employees do not leave when offered other jobs because the company has been treating them exceptionally well.
Trust and Loyalty Earn them Lifelong Customers
As the focus is mainly on quality and not on growth, the companies who choose to stay small preserve the trust of their customers. This trust earns them generations of customers that refuse to purchase from anywhere else.
Small Giant companies have excellent customer service departments. In this way, they track what the customers like and what can be improved. By catering to their customers, they also increase their revenue. Although the focus is on employees and customers, the company reaps the benefits eventually.
And let’s say you really want to expand. Then why not make multiple businesses with the same name without having to compromise on the quality? If you own a delicious fast-food chain in one part of the city, you may be unable to provide the same taste and quality throughout the country.
What you can do is create maybe a bakery in another city. The prestige and name you have earned will attract customers themselves, and you won’t be compromising on anything.
Small Giants Book Quotes
“If there’s one thing that every founder and leader in this book has in common with the others, it is a passion for what their companies do. They love it, and they have a burning desire to share it with other people. They thrive on the joy of contributing something great and unique to the world.” –Bo Burlingham
“When contemplating our reader, he reminded us, we needed to take the whole person into account. “I always tried to tell the editors to think of the businessperson as an artist using both sides of his brain,” he said. “You’re not just writing for a rational person. You are writing for someone who has the soul of an artist, and his expression is business.” –Bo Burlingham
Small Giants Book Review
The book does an amazing job of providing you with tactics and techniques that may sound small but usually go unnoticed. The author covers fourteen companies with different products ranging from food, snacks, garments, music, decor, and pictures.
This shows that the author’s advice about keeping the small company works for everyone as long as you are passionate and do not compromise on quality.
To Whom I Would Recommend Small Giants Book
- To the woman in her twenties thinking of starting a business but fears failure due to being short of resources.
- To the entrepreneurs who are thinking of expanding their business.
- And to anyone who is curious about how small companies become great.
Link: https://amzn.to/3zFhxWe