Here's where a small business can have an advantage in making news

As I write this, the top stories in the UK national business news concern Pfizer, HSBC, Odeon, Microsoft and HelloFresh. They're brands that people everywhere have heard of and which are sure to attract readers.?

Similarly, when it comes to the local news, each town and city has its own well-known names.?They might be brands that are recognised the world over, or they might just be known locally as a business which employs a lot of people or does a lot in the community.

If you’re a small or medium sized business, you might wonder how you can ever hope to get your news heard when it affects so many fewer people.

It’s true that people will always be interested in the famous names which have thousands of staff and millions of customers – or the local factory which has hundreds of people streaming through the gates each day.

But a small business which plays its cards right can actually have a few advantages over some of the big names.

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Some ways small businesses can have the edge

Collectively, small firms are hugely important, accounting for 99.3 per cent of Britain’s businesses, according to the Federation of Small Businesses.

Individually, however, small businesses can struggle to make an impression on the news agenda.

The first reason is there in the name. They’re small. The individual business’s highs and lows will less of a direct impact than those of their big counterparts, because fewer livelihoods are at stake.?

The second reason is that people in small businesses are often too busy running the business to go around talking about it. They could hire public relations help, but might feel they can’t justify the expense (or the time spent finding and briefing the PR people).

That’s a shame, because small businesses can have important?news and perspectives to share.

And if you’re a small enterprise looking to establish your business as a source of media-friendly expertise and opinion, you can turn your size to your advantage.

Here are some of the ways a small or medium sized enterprise can have the edge:

• They don’t have to be so cautious. Clearly, small businesses won’t have a team of in-house public relations people looking for ways to get the organisation into the media. But neither do they have the layers of people who have to sign off everything that’s said in the company’s name. And in most cases, they don’t have to think about regulators and share prices before making any public utterance. So they can speak out more freely, with personality, candour and the benefit of their years of experience.
• They can respond quickly. Imagine something is on the national news agenda and journalists are looking for an expert opinion. Insights and comments are needed pretty quickly – and a small business, free of all those layers of people I just mentioned, can respond quickly. (Lest I mislead anybody, some larger businesses are good at responding quickly or are getting better at it, so I'd advise you to get moving before more of them streamline their systems and come to eat your lunch.)
• The can put things plainly. This is yet another consequence of not having so many people involved in communications. In a big organisation, a communications person can draft something in punchy, plain English, only for a committee to translate it into meaningless corporate speak.?You, the small business person, can call a spade a spade, while a big corporation might be touting it as a person-powered garden cultivation solution.
• They can be accessible. You don’t have to be the UK’s top authority in your field. If you know your stuff, can communicate it and a journalist can reach you easily, you’re half-way to securing exposure. I have a host of people who I know will respond quickly if I ask them to comment on something related to their area of knowledge. Establish yourself as one of those accessible experts and you’re likely to be in the journalist’s contacts book for future stories.
• They can showcase some personalities. This follows on from my point about accessible expertise. If a small business contains a personality – an individual with particular strengths and knowledge – they can go ahead and put that person forward to the public, without fear that dozens of noses in the organisation will be put out of joint.
• They might be a weather vane. Your own business might be small, but that doesn’t mean it’s insignificant. For one thing, its successes, challenges and frustrations will probably mirror those of a thousand other small businesses. What’s more, it might act as a weather vane, showing what’s happening in a sector. Is your small business part of a bigger supply chain or eco-system? Do your fortunes tell us something about what’s going on in the car industry, or the property market, or the retail trade??You can point that out.
• They can be imperfect. There’s a lot of talk in the business world now about showing your missteps and revealing your vulnerability. But if you’re chief executive of a PLC, and are paid a very large salary to not make mistakes, you might not feel inclined to tell the world that you feel a bit of an imposter. It’s in the small business world that I’ve heard people speak honestly about the wrong turns they took and the times they felt they were muddling through. Generally, it made them seem more human and I think people appreciated their candour.

Let’s be authentic

A lot of what I’ve written above boils down to this: Small businesses can be authentic. (I’m not saying that big businesses can’t be authentic, but they may have to hold an awful lot of meetings about what authenticity means.)

There’s no point trying to set yourself up as an expert in international trade or the commercial potential of space exploration if you don't really have the track record to back it up. But if you’re in business, you’re probably an expert in something – and it may be so ingrained that you don’t even stop to consider how much of an expert you are.

If you can share some of that knowledge with conviction and clarity, you may have an edge over some of the biggest players in the land.?