How the David's (SME's) can face the Goliaths (Big Business)

I believe small businesses can take on Goliaths, even if they operate in Nigeria. But they have to get their people strategy right.

The popular belief is that financing and electricity is the reason why SME's are not growing. Well, these elements are critical success factors. But what about small businesses or mid-sized businesses that have all these things? And still don't grow like expected?

The difference between all the capital available today and the growth of organization's is human capital. Let's assume you have financial, physical and human capital, its your human capital that will most likely make the difference.

The management of employees goes a long way in ensuring continuity with best practices and building a reputation as a good place to work. No matter how small that business is, word about how you treat people will go around.

And the most important element of this issue is whether your organization provides psychological safety and the environment for talent to grow. Many talented people leave for these reasons.

I know organization's where people work one to two years and leave. If you are not KPMG or part of the big 4, this is not good for you. You practically have to start all over again, and it usually takes 2 to 4 months to replace talented employees. Imagine what that does in a 12 month business cycle?

How can any organization grow at its normal rate with this sort of employee churn?

When we started work just after school, a friend was telling me about his experience where he worked as an Junior Web Developer. At the end of the year, management organized a retreat, invited facilitators from Shell, Banks and one big motivational speaker.

The theme for the retreat was growth through aggressive sales or something like that. Well, every company needs to sell to pay staff and meet other statutory and growth obligations.

I have to draw your attention to the fact that the employees who were supposed to be aggressive to make sales did not have employment letters, no health coverage, and many other things. But they had a facilitator at the end of the year.

In fairness to employers, there also exists the issue of capacity of employees. Many SME's cannot afford enough A players, so they settle for many C players and a few B players and one or two A players. The C players usually frustrate the B and A players, so the latter leave or withdraw.

My advice for SME's in such situation is to figure out a A to keep their A and B players, while cutting the C players out through performance appraisals, that is where they don't respond to training.

I still believe David's (SME's) can face Goliath's (Big Businesses), they just have to pay more attention to their people strategy.