In the good old days, a company was considered BIG if they occupied
spacious and well-furnished offices, owned their buildings complete with
spacious parking lots, hired hundreds of employees and purchased
expensive advertising slots in TV, Radio, Magazines and Newspapers. These
companies are visible everywhere. Their corporate names are printed in
capitalized bold letters in the phone books. Everyone – well, almost everyone
are familiar with their names.
It’s a different story now.
In the virtual community, the small guys are giving the big boys a run for their
money. With sheer guts and a few thousand dollars to start up, a lot of
home-based entrepreneurs are making a killing day-in and day-out on the
Internet. All done in the private confines of their little home-offices (very often
called, kitchen, dining, garage, bedroom, den or whatever part of the house).
In the Internet, we small guys don’t have to fear the big guys. We can spend
sleepless nights pouring all those tutorial books on HTML programming to
create the site that will clobber those million-dollar creations to pieces. If
they cannot stand you, they can buy you out! And I am sure that you like
that, as it will make you rich!
We small guys have more flexibility with our operations. We have more
control. We can do what we want. In fact, although the big boys have the
money to squander, they are incapable of doing what we small fries can do
at a click of the “mouse”. For example, it will take five working days or
maybe a week or more, for a big corporation to make a very simple change of
a misspelled word on the website. If that mistake was observed at the time
when the person in charge of the Internet was on three-month vacation leave,
that error may have to stay there while the whole company suffers the
degradation that a simple word brought about.
One thing we can observe in most websites of the big boys is that it remains
the same almost forever (except for the news and media sites that need to
be updated daily). Why? Because, nobody can change it on his own volition.
Changes may have to pass the approval of the manager; sometimes even the
board of directors or the chairman of the board. When a thing is approved, it
then goes back down the corporate ladder following the same steps as when
it went up. When the changes are made, new developments have happened
and the change may not be needed anymore. Ironically, because of the
internal squabble necessary to get things done, big corporations are not very
enthusiastic about their presence on the Web.
We give due respect to the big boys because they really have impressive
websites. They can afford to hire a $300.00 an hour Webmaster and a
platoon of assistants to make them a small slick button.
As I said earlier, size doesn’t matter in the Internet. In fact, come to think of
it, being small has its advantages. If you were working alone, all the
decisions are yours. You make changes, you make your own design, you
quote your own prices, you decide on everything—good or no good.
If you were working with your wife, you may have to disagree on some points
but it is easier to make a decision. You don’t need glamorous “bull” sessions
or so much brainstorming. As new ideas pump in, all you need is implement
it. Try it. If it doesn’t work, kill it. Simple.
In the Internet, being big in the real world does not directly result to
profitability and financial success. In fact, most of the major dot.coms are so
deep in the red. A small obscure dot.com who provides the product or service
to his targeted market and who knows how to promote and market his/her
website to this gigantic web world has all the chances equal to the well-oiled
corporations.
Simply said, in the Internet, we can be as BIG as anyone else. That is of
course, when you know how.
About the Author
Nach Maravilla
Publisher
Power HomeBiz Guides - Making Small Business Do Big Business
http://www.powerhomebiz.com
nachm@powerhomebiz.com