Not Being Big is Expensive
You may be familiar with the maxim that it’s expensive to be poor. When you’re poor, you don’t have access to most of the tools and methods people who are better off can use to trim their costs.
That happens to businesses too. Not being big is expensive. As a small to medium sized business, you simply can’t use some of the tools and methods big businesses can use to do things cost effectively. Not that all big businesses actually do operate cost effectively, but they have the means to do it if they want.
Remember my post about Incremental Steps?
The good news? A crucial piece of software integration that wasn’t working is working now, so I don’t need to fall all the way back to a contingency plan.
The bad news? This portion of the market caters to customers who are only of modest size themselves. The customers aren’t big enough to operate the way big companies do, and generally don’t know how to operate that way yet.
The software vendors catering to these customers are in the same boat. They’re still using methods that are popular and seem easy. Big, serious, mission critical enterprises don’t use those methods as their foundation for good reasons.
This is another part of what a business has to grapple with when it grows from small, wild and woolly to a modest size and more serious, but not big yet. The tools within its reach aren’t as well built, well tested, well documented and well maintained as high-end tools.
To be fair, the tools I’m dealing with at the moment have patient, capable support staff. I simply shouldn’t need them this much. The documentation should be more clear, more thorough and more accurate. The software should not be so twitchy.
This doesn’t mean they are awful. They’re a prominent provider in their field, one of the better options. That’s why I chose them. They simply aren’t in the same league as the most weighty names in their field. They’re in the league that’s appropriate for the market they serve, the small to medium sized businesses who can’t step all the way up to the heftiest names yet.
When a big business adopts a high-end software tool, the tool is usually complex and has a long learning curve. The time it takes for staff to learn to use the new tool is part of the cost of adopting it.
When a business of modest size adopts a medium-tier software tool, there isn’t as much functionality to learn. The learning curve is theoretically shorter and shouldn’t cost so much.
However, there is a cost in needing to make do with documentation that isn’t so good and more oddities in the way things work.
It’s a stealthy expense. No vendor in their right mind would tell you up front that you’ll encounter it if you choose their product. They may not even realize it’s happening. They’re immersed in their stuff all the time. They’ve forgotten how it looks to a newcomer.
It’s harder to budget for this in terms of both money and time. With high-end products, you get a clearer training path and the vendor can tell you with more certainty how long it will take your staff to get up to speed with their product. In the small to medium market, this isn’t so clear. You dive in and find out about it as you go. It hits your cash flow and your workflow, but it’s hard to estimate how hard it will hit.
When businesses try to grow, it isn’t always just about making more money. Sometimes getting access to better tools is part of the ambition. Not being big is expensive and filled with uncertainties.
Sometimes a business just wants to get big enough not to have to wrestle with that any more.