Do not be afraid of small business

Recently, I have often come across articles where an equal sign is placed between a small business and losers. An example of one of the last such articles: " Sergey Belousov about zombie startups that are of no use, but sorry to get rid of ." Short sense: if the company lives, but does not develop, then this is a failed project and it is time to move on to a new one. I do not agree with this direction of thought. Not all companies can grow and be tremendously successful. And this is nothing bad. If the company lives, that's good. They are not zombies, but simply companies that have found their niche. Small business is great.

The opinion is hovering on the Internet that if a business does not fly to the skies for several years, then it’s a failure and it’s time to move on to something new. People come to your senses! This is normal. This is how 99% of businesses exist around us. Take a look around. Here is another “start-up” who started selling jackets at the bazaar and in a few years got only two tents. And around him are hundreds of the same startups. Here the shoemaker opens the tent, not even dreaming of a network of shoemakers. Here is another person who decides to open a first taxi in the city.

Are they all losers? Not. These are people involved in small business. They may never get a star from the sky, but, most likely, their life is much better than sitting out their pants in the office. At least they have more freedom, hope, and potential.

You say that this is so clear. But there is no point in doing business that will remain small. Well, if you do something, then with a potential scope and growth. The commonplace reason for such desires is to earn more than the seller in the bazaar or “taxi station” of three taxis.
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And again, I disagree. Small business does not mean low income and boredom! I will give a couple of examples.

The first of them is closer to me in spirit (see what I do ), although it seems not so clear to most readers. There is such a company EdisonDesignGroup (EDG), which is developing a library for preprocessing and parsing C / C ++ programs. In general, they make the engine, on the basis of which others develop compilers and static code analyzers. For example, Parasoft and Coverity code analyzers are based on EDG. Also, the people of this company have a significant impact on the development of the C ++ standard.

Do you think this is a whole corporation? Nothing like this. I do not know if they have support staff, but judging by this page , they have only 5 people!

At the same time, their clients are the largest companies, and they themselves in many respects set the development vector of the C ++ language. Here is such a small business.

Now another, more illustrative example. Not so long ago, Alex Exler described the life of the TorrefazioneCaffeLelli high-end coffee factory . I will not retell, but I suggest to get acquainted with the original: Elite coffee factory .

The most important thing for us in the article is the following:

On the question of where the people went, Leonardo explained very simply that only he (on roasting) and his sister (packing) work here. When there are too many orders, they hire a couple more people to pack. But usually work together.

So much for the family business. The company is quite famous, it makes a wonderful product, but only three people actually work there - Leonardo, his sister and the secretary on the phone, everything!

Someone will say that they are great, but they are boring, day-to-day to fry, pack and sell coffee. Nothing like this:

Leonardo personally travels around the coffee plantations of the whole world (he himself said that some of these trips were quite extreme) and selects suppliers of coffee beans for his product there.

And the roasting process is generally a creative process, requiring experiments with different coffees and their multiple tastings. What is not innovative research?

I will not draw any conclusions, but I hope I could show the picture from a different angle. Having multiple viewing angles on anything is useful anyway. Thanks for attention. And success in any endeavors.