Why Trying to Look Like a Corporate Might Be Holding Back Your Exit Plan
When business owners set out to scale, many fall into the trap of copying large corporates. After all, that’s what “successful” businesses look like, right? Not quite.
In this episode of Exit Insights, host Darryl Bates-Brownsword sits down with business growth expert Kevin Harrington to unpack why mimicking corporate structures too early can be a disaster for SMEs – especially if you’re aiming to increase your business valuation or prepare for exit.
Kevin and Darryl explore what really works for SMEs growing from £1M to £10M in revenue – and how to stay agile, efficient, and exit-ready along the way.
Read more: SME vs Corporate: Finding the Right Growth Path with Kevin Harrington???? What You’ll Learn
- Why corporate-style bureaucracy slows growth – SMEs thrive on agility. Corporates don’t. Adding layers of approval and reporting too early can suffocate progress.
- How to evolve your business structure – As your business hits key inflection points (£1M → £3M → £10M), your internal structure must change. Start with a functional structure, not role-based.
- The importance of leadership development – Promoting loyal team members is great – but to grow, you’ll need to invest in their leadership skills or bring in experienced outsiders.
- The cultural challenge of growth – Every growth spurt changes your business. Learning how to retain the personal touch while scaling is vital for long-term success.
Transcript
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (00:54)
Welcome to the podcast that’s dedicated to helping business owners build a business that’s exit ready so that it’s ready when you are, whenever that might be. This is the Exit Insights podcast brought to you by Fabric. I’m Darryl Bates-Brownsword and joining me today is my partner in, I was going to say partner in crime, that may not translate too well, but Kevin, thanks for joining me today.
Kevin Harrington (01:16)
Hi, Darryl, see you in court then. Now we’ve been doing this for quite a while, haven’t we? For a few years now, we’ve been doing webinars, podcasts and things and we’ve covered a huge amount of ground. we were talking a couple of minutes ago before we started about what we’re gonna cover today. And… ⁓
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (01:19)
Yeah.
You’re giving away all our secrets now!
Kevin Harrington (01:41)
Yeah, but the thing that the thread through everything we’ve ever covered has been about supporting SME business owners and businesses. And you were talking earlier about the growing up too quickly or growing up at the right speed for businesses. ⁓ For the sake of the listeners, I kind of agree with you, Daryl.
we need to make sure SMEs maximize being an SME rather than try and be some faceless corporate because they think that’s the thing to do. And so I guess what we’re talking about today is the concepts that go through people’s minds and the people they meet that make them think they should behave more like a corporate and how to deal with that. And then, okay, if you’re not going to behave like a corporate, how do you maximize being an SME?
How do you stay with that free to foot situation where you can get things done quickly and so on and still manage to evolve and be competitive? I think that’s our agenda. Is that what we agreed?
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (02:48)
Yeah, look, it’s around structure and evolving your structure, I guess, and getting the right type of structure in your business. as a business owner, you always want an efficient and effective business. ⁓ And you don’t want to be slaving a stack of hours yourself. ⁓ You want the business to be under control, but you want the right level of bureaucracy and infrastructure in place for the current size of your business.
And that doesn’t mean copying what corporates do necessarily until you got, I don’t know, 2000 employees and you need that level of administration and structure and bureaucracy in your business to get the right levels of command and control and financial diligence in your business. most of our businesses that we’re talking to and we work with are that sort of five to 50 million revenue mark. So, yeah, then they’ve got nowhere near that number of people.
and they’re in their scale up growth transitioning phase. ⁓ And so which means their structure is always evolving. But what’s the right level of control and delegation and culture that makes working in an SME attractive and desirable ⁓ compared to working in a corporate? And that’s what we’re exploring. And how do we evolve that in a designed, planned way rather than just sort of
you know, reacting and in an ad hoc space, which is what a lot of businesses do. And until they have some sort of structural advice or business architect working with them going, Hey, here’s how to design a structure that evolves and grows with your business and helps you maintain control along the way.
Kevin Harrington (04:32)
Yeah, so I think there’s three things that make people consider or think about becoming more corporate in their behaviors and structure. I think one is vanity or peer pressure. Think of what I’m the big mighty I am. That might be if the cat fits where it I think this the second one is banks. When I was
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (04:47)
Yeah.
Kevin Harrington (04:59)
working up in the north of England, I was working with ⁓ a company which needed refinancing. And the bank’s approach to considering it meant they had to start behaving like a corporate and the amount of reporting and analysis that was going on, that was disproportionate to the risk that was being presented to the bank. So there was almost an infrastructure that was starting to evolve that said we need to do this mad reporting and risk analysis and so on, which is disproportionate. And the
The third reason is that, you if I’m running an SME and I’m really good at what I do, and, you know, we make great widgets, the customers love us and want to grow, I might consider talking to a business growth consultant. And I don’t know what the numbers are, but I’d hazard a guess that the majority of business consultants in the UK are ex-corporate. And I would also hazard a guess that a large swathe of them have not worked in SMEs themselves either.
⁓ Yeah, yeah, that’s another, yeah, absolutely. And so I think, you if you talk to someone that knows one way of doing it, they’re unlikely to come back with a different way of doing it. ⁓ So I think those are the three reasons. It’s kind of vanity, it’s the banking regulation type pressures that you get and it’s consultants, ⁓ not all.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (06:01)
or their own business.
Kevin Harrington (06:27)
say, not all banks, not all consultants, but I think that sums up the pressures that there and I think most people would recognise those.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (06:35)
So, yeah, and I think you bang on and it’s probably really helpful at this stage to define what we mean by corporate behavior. Because I see a lot of people out there going, ⁓ corporate, I don’t want to be like corporate. don’t want to do this and corporate this and corporate that. What does corporate behavior mean? What does it mean when we say corporate? I don’t want to be like a corporate or I do want to be like a corporate.
Kevin Harrington (06:57)
There are many, many things out there, but I think the primary thing that in this context that’s important is that we always say to SMEs, work out what functions you’ve got to get done in your business and make sure they’re being handled. If you’re a corporate, it tends more towards how many things go on in your business where you need one person for each. And if you’re a five person business, it’s quite likely
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (07:22)
Yeah.
Kevin Harrington (07:27)
that sales and marketing and some production might be carried out by one person. ⁓ if a corporate would have all these things in separate little pigeonholes, separate little sets of KPIs and fiefdoms evolving perhaps.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (07:45)
So we’re talking about operating structure, aren’t we? And how you draw or show the operating structure and communicate the operating structure. In an SME, the best way to do that is functional based and have your operating structure mapped out by function. And what we tend to see in corporates is it’s role-based. You’ve got an individual who does this and an individual who does that, and then it’s the role around the individuals. So there’s one way.
And I think another way that we tend to see a massive difference between corporate and an SME is the culture. So in corporates, decision making is slow, slow, slow. You’ve got a chain of command and you need a written approval and cover your butt and process to get anything approved or to progress it. Whereas an SME often decisions are you go straight to the owner of the founder of the business and go, think we should do this.
If it feels right, if it’s the right sort of thing, a decision can be made very quickly, same day sometimes or within a few days to progress it forward and find the budget for it.
Kevin Harrington (08:52)
And it’s
involved in what you’re saying there, Daryl, is there’s this issue about communication around things, because of the structure, the hierarchical structure that gets embedded with lots of different departments. Quite often, a decision made in one team has to go up the top of that team to the board and then gets cascaded down somewhere else. That’s very, very common, ⁓ even when people know it’s not the right thing to necessarily do. Whereas an SME,
can often have a standup meeting once a week when everyone that’s available hears everything that’s going on. And that’s a competitive advantage. Now, if people start losing that, it’s madness. SMEs are fleet of foot and make quick decisions quickly, like you say, and that should be built upon, not given away for the benefits of being a corporate, which are fairly slim sometimes.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (09:29)
Yeah.
So we don’t want the slowness. We don’t want the cover your backside ⁓ and protection and or political sides of ⁓ culture that a corporate have. And sometimes a whole lot of people, know, just self-interest where an SME is a lot more team interest. I’m being really generic here and I know there’s lots going to be people give me lots of exceptions to the rule. ⁓ But yeah, that’s the way, you know, I’ve seen it and experienced it. So.
We’ve talked about what we don’t want. What is going to work instead for an SME? We already touched on having a functional structure. How does that unfold as a business grows? So let’s start at the bottom end of, know, I guess where it really kicks into play at about a one mil revenue in the UK I’m talking about here. One million revenues is generally 10 ish people. What sort of structure do we need for a business of that size?
Kevin Harrington (10:47)
I mean, you pick on a point which is a fairly, fairly much a pivot point for businesses, because, you know, it gets to 10 because one person started the business, then got an assistant and so on. But what the precise number is less important than the principle here. The principle is when it gets to around about 10 people, it becomes
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (10:53)
That’s the first one, I reckon, or the second one.
Kevin Harrington (11:15)
inefficient and probably not effective for the business owner to directly manage everyone. And, you know, probably the founder of the business is the chief artisan, engineer, whatever, or the chief person that knows the marketplace and therefore leads on the sales and marketing thing. We’re getting to a stage now where that business owner must start making sure that their specialist skills and attributes
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (11:22)
That’s it.
Kevin Harrington (11:43)
continue to be used for the benefit of the business is what got it started. Let’s get it to carry on. And there may be the other areas which is not their forte, which need perhaps on to lead that team. So there might be a production focus at one end of the business and a ⁓ sales and marketing customer facing but at the other end. And so all of a sudden, there’s reporting lines, albeit fairly faint ones coming into play that
mean that everyone can work efficiently, effectively, everyone can still talk to each other when it’s 12 people, you’re still going to talk to the business owner if you report someone else.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (12:20)
Yeah, everyone has a direct line to the business owner. The business owner is making all the decisions often in a business of that size. The business owner is the best, most highly skilled person in each of the functions because everyone he or she has employed is typically there. It’s been a cost based decision as much as possible. So all those people are good technical roles, ⁓ possibly haven’t had any leadership or management experience themselves in the past.
So there’s quite a gap between skills between the owner and each of those 10, 12 employees. And that’s the exact dynamic that means why we call it an inflection point, because a lot of businesses get stuck there and they never progress beyond there. And that’s fine, but we’re just talking about the understanding of why that happens.
Kevin Harrington (13:08)
Yeah. And this is where a business owner needs to do a lot of navel gazing and going, what do I want to try and achieve? And it’s a point where if the business is going to grow on a sustainable basis, they’re going to have to start considering employing people that are more expensive than the previous hires. Probably a challenge to the business owner with ideas and so why are we doing it like this? Would it not be better if we did that? So all of sudden,
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (13:16)
Yeah.
Kevin Harrington (13:38)
bolstering up what is the beginnings of a leadership team for a business. And that’s a major challenge for some business owners, but made the right way. It’s a start for something big.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (13:43)
Yeah.
Well, I think you’ve hit the nail on the head and said, we’ve got to start with vision. What’s the aspiration for the business? Where do the owners want to take it? Because if they want to plateau and stay at that one mil revenue mark, that’s fine. But from a valuation perspective, it’s never going to be worth a heck of a lot because it’s the very definition of being owner dependent. And we’ve also talked about in the past and other podcasts, the three times rule. And that is that,
Every time you’re tripled in size, you need to rebuild your infrastructure and your systems and your structure and what have you. So this is where we’re at one of those inflection points where we’ve tripled in size and got up to one mil. So we need a new structure and that new structure now will get us to about three mil, which is triple ⁓ where we’re at now. And what you’re saying is we’re recruiting our first leadership team. Now, what I’ve seen is
is the leaders at this stage of the business, it’s often their first leadership role. They’ve often been long standing employees and have just been promoted. So they’ve grown into the role and they’ve possibly not had any experience or exposure to management and leadership roles outside of the business they’re currently in. They’re loyal employees who the owners trust. ⁓ So there’s often still that gap. They’re in a leadership role, they’re growing, ⁓ but they’re not what you’d call an experienced
leadership team for the business. But that’s exactly what you need to get them through this hurdle, this inflection point up to the next stage of the business as they start to recruit people and create that interim layer between the owner and the next layer of the business of the people who are hands on. And it’s interesting there, I guess, to raise at this point, the change in culture that the business goes through at this point, it’s
Some people will call it corporate and complain about it because they’ve always had a direct line ⁓ to the owners of the business. But now for efficiency, because there’s more people in the business, we need to create that interim layer, that first leadership layer. And that disrupts a lot of people in the business. And often through these changes, we get some staff turnover, which we never saw before.
Kevin Harrington (16:05)
Yeah, and just as a side point there, staff turnover is a healthy thing, as long as it’s for the right reasons. It’s great to see people grow in your business and you can’t yet accommodate them and they go off to greater things elsewhere and carry on being business associates of some sort. That’s wonderful. But any vacancy gives you an opportunity to get new blood in with other experiences from elsewhere and so on. So it’s not the end of the world, but it’s definitely one of the things.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (16:10)
Yep.
Kevin Harrington (16:34)
I would be always tracking in a business what the staff turnover is because it’s an indicator of how the culture’s working and so on. one in 20 people might leave a year. That’s probably perfectly okay. But you decide what’s gonna be the trigger point for you to get concerned about it. But you mentioned promoting people from within or growing them from within into this leadership team. It’s interesting, isn’t it? I wonder what percentage of people in a
one, two, three million pound business that get hooked up into this sort of leadership position. I wonder how many of them get any form of training for the new skills and competencies they need to have. It’s an investment that people should build into their budget. And there are many industry courses in most sectors that can help. There are lots of colleges that do staff. There’s lots of online training. There’s all sorts of things that can be done.
It could be an external mentor or coach or whatever. But if you’re paying someone a chunk of money, wouldn’t it be great if you got true value for money out of it? Let’s say you were paying someone 50,000 pounds for a role, wouldn’t it be nice for them to be happy doing the job, but you get 70 grand’s worth of value or whatever. The danger is you pay them 50,000 and you get frustrated because you’re 30,000 pounds worth of value and you’re having to do half their job for them.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (17:50)
Thank
Kevin Harrington (18:01)
Well, is that a surprise if they’re not prepared for that role they’re in? So training and development and coaching and mentoring should become, this is the first stage in a business where it should start to become currency of conversation.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (18:15)
Yeah. So it’s a really interesting point, isn’t it? And understanding that there’s, you know, going back to there’s always cultural and commercial sides and things you can consider when when looking at these businesses in this way.
So we’ve now, we’ve got our first leadership team. We’ve grown a lot of people. We’ve recruited under them to fill the gaps. ⁓ We’re training them and ⁓ often when we’re ⁓ conscious of what we need to train them in and we haven’t provided them with additional leadership training. We probably haven’t had any ourselves as owners in the business, who knows? ⁓ But we get the business and we keep growing. We keep doing more of the same. We’re ambitious, we’re hardworking.
And we get the business from that one mill to three mill. So we’ve now got £3 million in revenue. We’ve probably got – what’s that – about 30 people in the business. We’re doing OK. What do we need to do now? We’re going, hey, we’re now three times the size of what we were. We’re probably starting to creak and show some signs of stress and growing pains, which is always a sign of we’ve outgrown our current structure. How does that show up? Well,
people start to leave, people start to give us a lot of advice, a lot of advice around how we should be doing things better. That often comes across. What else do you see at this stage, do you think?
Kevin Harrington (19:40)
Well, customers can be leaving if things are going wrong. But it’s the, it really is a pretty big change from £1m to £3 million. Whatever a business was using at the £1 million stage for keeping track of their customers’ information and communications and so forth, you’ve probably grown out of. And so £3 million’s a time to go, do you know what? We’re very close to our customers, but…
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (19:42)
House Museum.
Kevin Harrington (20:07)
we’ve got lots of people that are dealing with each customer. How do we corral that to the benefit of the customer, which therefore benefits our business? So I’m talking about CRM systems. and CRM systems for me, if you start thinking about it saying, how is this gonna benefit our customer? It’s an amazing outcome compared to just how can we corral all the facts in one place and flog them more and send them out loads of emails. Getting that right is
is really important. But all of a sudden with your 30 person business in a revenue of 3 million, if someone phones up the account person and says, my order didn’t turn up, which is why I’m not paying you, all that information is going to be at their fingertips in the finance department. And it’s the same information that sales and marketing and the business owner have as well. And data is now something that really matters. You’ve got
Because your business is scaling, there are more transaction points, there are more variables, there’s more things you can track. And these can give you lead and lag indicators to what’s gonna happen to your business. And they should still be kept simple, but there’s enough data there now to make a material difference to how you make decisions.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (21:27)
And AI makes it even easier nowadays. So you don’t have to spend days analyzing it. You can get some really useful information really quickly. So we’re running out of excuses not to do it.
Kevin Harrington (21:41)
I’m sure we can keep making a few though.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (21:46)
We’ll have a crack. Okay, so we’ve got that big cultural change from one to three. We’ve gone from the people all having direct lines of communication with the owner, the owner leader in the business, to a business now that’s got 30 odd people potentially. We’ve got a layer of management, possibly one, maybe two layers of management. ⁓ It’s not what I’m gonna call a professional management team.
It’s a management team that are in the role and doing a good job, but they’re at your… ⁓ Yeah, it’s their first role and they’ve never ⁓ had a big job before. To get past that £3 million and to get to a £10 million business, we really would benefit from starting to introduce and bring in leaders into the business from outside of the business. Someone who’s been in that role in a much bigger business,
who can bring that knowledge and experience and take the business to the next level. And that’s what I’m referring to when I say a professional manager or a professional leader in the business. They’ve had that role in numerous organisations. They’ve got a lot of experience. They can bring some outside expertise ⁓ and start to bring some best practice into your organisation because you’re getting ⁓ exposure to the way a lot of other people have done it. And you can get some benchmarking there as well.
Kevin Harrington (23:10)
Yeah, that sort of person you’re bringing in, you’re buying a pair of hands, plus you’re bringing in intellect and knowledge.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (23:18)
Yeah, yeah, and that’s what I’m trying to capture when I call them the professional leadership and management team. And that’s what you need to get from three to 10. now you’ve got this professional management team in place. They can take the business through that next phase ⁓ and they can build the right structure and expand and scale the structure below them. ⁓ Now what happens culturally in a business that goes through this?
Kevin Harrington (23:23)
Hmm.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (23:46)
Well, those who have been there for a while and are in the leadership roles, some of them will get upset and get their nose put out of joint because they didn’t get the bigger role. Call it a C level as opposed to a management role. But yeah, some people get upset because they didn’t get the job and ⁓ they know the business better than anyone, which they do, but they don’t know the role better than anyone.
Kevin Harrington (24:12)
Yeah, it’s ⁓ a thing that we’ve not mentioned really here is, is business planning and forecasting the dreaded spreadsheets. When you’re a 1 million pound business, the business owner kind of inherently knows what’s going on most of the time. 3 million is getting a bit more well, we need to probably scribble a few numbers down. But when you get to the 10 million kind of size, your
Your business is occasionally hitting changes that are a step change in either income or cost. And I’m thinking, all of a you go from 30 to 100 people, for example, it’s unlikely you had space for 70 more people in your office for 30. And all of a sudden you’re tripling the number of heads you’re providing free coffee to all day, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. This needs to be modeled.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (24:59)
Yep.
Kevin Harrington (25:09)
I’ve seen and I’m sure you’ve seen as well, Daryl, people go, yeah, we’re ready to do this. And they lurch into some glamorous office. And the business almost, well, sometimes it fails, but there’s this kind of stalling effect where all of a sudden, all we’re chasing is cash flow because we need to pay the bills. And modeling this and you perhaps using an external finance person or perhaps you’ve got one already, but work out.
whether you can afford it, you know, what’s the strain on the system going to be and if it is a strain, where do you need to apply more resource so that you so that you can cruise through it? You’re not going to grow without step effects, get ready for them to deal with them.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (25:53)
It’s a good point. we’ve been talking this so far and we haven’t even mentioned pace and speed of change. if we’re growing quickly, then we’re going to be incurring costs faster than the cash is coming in. And that can really hamper things and thus you need a CFO or someone with… And there’s what we’re talking about, the professionalized level of management skills. Have you got a financial controller, an accountant, a bookkeeper? If someone’s your bookkeeper and they’ve grown up,
and they’re now your finance director. Do they really have the skills of an experienced finance director or CFO from outside the business who has a really strategic forward looking viewpoint as opposed to an operational viewpoint? And we’re applying that thinking across all of the functions in the business. And that’s what we’re referring to as a professional management team. So, yeah, as the business grows, this professional management team is going to move from an operational
management team of a three million pound business of being really good at the tactical issues of the business to the next layer up to get from from 10 to 30 is is where you really need that that forward looking management team with great strategy skills, business planning, market analysis skills. They’re spending a lot more time on the analysis and thinking and application and reviewing the data, as you mentioned there earlier, Kevin. So
And what viewers or listeners will be picking up here is as we’re moving through and we’re talking more and more about the level of capability, you know, that we’re going to be recognizing that that’s more and more corporate. And it is, but it’s the right level of corporateness, I guess, ⁓ as the business grows. And we haven’t even touched on what are some of the special things about an SME SMEs. Yeah, they make decisions really quick, but they also really
develop and ⁓ protect and value relationships. They have relationships in their community a lot more. They have personal relationships rather than transactional relationships, which is fantastic because they support the community and everyone knows them and they’ve got that reputation. But there are risks with that as well. And ⁓ what we touched on earlier of going, if we have great relationships, we may end up
⁓ having great relationships and those relationships meaning that we’re too dependent on just too few people. thinking customers particularly, we may have great relationships with our customers, which could lead us to the point where we’re too dependent on just too few customers to generate the bulk of our revenue.
Kevin Harrington (28:38)
Yeah, When a business first starts, when it’s one, two, three, four people, there’s a peculiar balance between demand and supply. And it just works. And it’s because it works, it gets to 10 people. And now we’re talking when you get up to the three to 10 million pound business.
there needs to be some intelligent observation of what’s going on. What’s the risk that a competitor will steal your customer? What’s the customer looking for? Have we lost touch with what they’re after? And we need to start thinking about how we’re going to balance creating demand or picking up on the demand that’s there, depending how you want to go about running your business and how we can have a supply
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (29:16)
Yeah.
Kevin Harrington (29:30)
supply chain that is robust enough to cope with the business slowing down 10% or doubling. You know, what in those scenarios, what could you do? Because growing and letting customers down means that you won’t have a supplier problem anymore. You’ve got more than you need because you’ve lost your customers. So it needs it becomes more of a chess game, I guess, going if that happens, what’s what’s what’s the
the next move going to be from the marketplace. And the SMEs have got a beautiful position. You know, even businesses with 100 to 250 people or so, they’ve got this beautiful position that they still genuinely love the industries and sectors they’re in. They know the people, they can actually get out there and really find out what’s going on. And corporates have to use different methodologies to do that, which are expensive, not as
nuanced.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (30:30)
Yeah, they’ve got that real personal touch of actually caring and people know they’re caring. Unlike, you know, the corporates who, every time you have an engagement or a touch point with them, they send you a survey. How likely are you to refer them? I had one the other day and I was thinking through, well, yeah, look, the engagement point that the person did okay. The fact that I had to contact you about this is the frustrating bit and you haven’t asked me about that.
That’s the problem you need to solve, Mr. Business, because you created this issue where I had to be in touch with you. Yeah, the person handled it. And no, I’m not going to say I love dealing with you because that person solved my problem. I shouldn’t have had the problem in the first place if you really cared about your customers.
Kevin Harrington (31:16)
Yeah, and you know, we’ve heard of great stories over our careers where the SME owner of the 100 person company has just picked the phone up or gone to see a customer and said, look, we didn’t get that dead right. Hopefully you’re satisfied with how we’ve solved it. Let’s talk to you more about how we can get a smoother.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (31:30)
you
Kevin Harrington (31:39)
solution to or whatever it might be. And all of a sudden you’ve got a customer that’s going to have a lifetime value of them is going to grow. it’s because we’re on the same team as the client.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (31:52)
Yeah, someone who actually cares as opposed to someone going through the motions because this is the corporate process. So where have we got to? think we’ve, well, hopefully we’ve put forward an argument of going, hey, look, as your business grows, you do need more rigor. You do need more systems and structure as you’ve got more people in your business. You just do. We know it’s hard to lose that, hard not to lose that personal touch as your business gets too big.
⁓ But it is a cost of growth. With focus, you can maintain that culture of a smaller business because it is about relationships and personal ⁓ caring and personal accountability. And you can consciously inject that into your roles as you move forward with your business. What else are we covered in ⁓ terms of wrap up here today, Kevin?
Kevin Harrington (32:48)
I think that was just banging through my head there was.
motivations of businesses with the essence of all of this is don’t become a corporate if you don’t need to be because being an SME is great. So here we go, as ever, I’m sure on the show notes, there will be an address for complaints, but here we go. A corporate sets out to make money, therefore tries to solve the customer’s problems. An SME tries to solve the customer’s problems and by doing so makes money. And it’s
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (33:13)
you
Kevin Harrington (33:21)
You choose where that cutoff point is, changeover point is, but put in the customer first, which the SME can do better than a corporate, is a competitive edge. It’s compelling, engaging, and leads to success.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (33:32)
address.
Yeah, for me, comes down to SMEs have a soul, corporates are soulless.
Kevin Harrington (33:40)
Complaints to Darryl.
Darryl Bates-Brownsword (33:43)
I didn’t want you getting all the attention.
Kevin, brilliant. Thanks for sharing your insights with me today. Yes.
Kevin Harrington (33:52)
Talk soon, Darryl. Cheers.