They also create roadblocks and find ways to extract money and power from small businesses in order to maintain their positions and increase profits. But what can be less obvious is that these same entities are constantly finding new ways to stunt small-business growth to keep new entrants and potential competitors at bay. It’s essentially reputational laundering. Large corporations are happy to invoke small business when convenient, especially when it helps them keep power. What can get lost in this is that small businesses already are at a competitive disadvantage, often because of the bigger players that purport to support them. And now that the economy is rebounding, powerful business interests say they’re still looking out for the up-and-comers on issues such as wages, unemployment, and regulation, a common talking point being that any changes might put smaller operations at a competitive disadvantage. Uber, likewise, emphasized its help to restaurants. Facebook highlighted all sorts of ways it says it helps small business and warned that regulations for the social media giant would actually come at a cost to the little guy. They all have a responsibility for the environment and to their communities.īut let’s hope whoever leads this country after next year’s elections can find some way to address these issues without causing undue economic harm to the very companies that so many small businesses rely on.Major corporations really want you to know how much they care about small businesses - as long as those small businesses don’t compete with them or cause them too much trouble.ĭuring the pandemic, big companies were sure to draw attention to the ways they were supporting the little guy. Most should probably be paying more taxes. Many of their CEOs do earn too much money. The people running them have an obligation to their shareholders to grow and sometimes they make bad decisions in order to meet that obligation. Of course, big companies need to be kept in check. They’re looking to small businesses to do all of this and none of this would be happening without those big companies employing them. They’re seeking financial advice and having their tax returns prepared. They’re giving to charities, taking Uber rides and getting their hair styled. They’re having their lawns mowed, their kitchens redone and their cars repaired. They’re buying pizzas, visiting merchants and going out to dinner. Those are the people that live near where they work. Well, most of them, anyway.īig companies also have other big impacts on small businesses even when they don’t have direct corporate contracts. But the checks are bigger and the opportunities can be superior. Yes, the risks of becoming too reliant on that one big customer are also greater. Sure, the bureaucracy, the politics and the slow decision making can oftentimes be a challenge. My small business takes in about 40% of our work from larger corporations. As a result of these relationships, a majority of the small businesses questioned have been able to hire more employees. The study, which was based on the responses of more than 500 small and mid-sized companies with annual revenues between $250,000 and $1bn found that 81% of those participants planned an increase in their sales to big corporations (those with more than $1bn in revenues) over the next five years and also more than half of the respondents expected their income from those big customers to increase by more than 50% during that period.Īs the study’s authors point out, many small companies get as much as 30-50% of their revenues from big customers every year and 40% of those have grown their businesses organically because of those corporate contracts. That fact was validated by a recent American Express study.
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