Three Top Tips for Making Your Small Business Look Big

Sometimes, bigger is better. If you’re a little coffee shop, and you’re wanting to maintain a small niche brand with just a few loyal employees, then that’s fine. But for smaller companies that want to do business with bigger ones, it can sometimes be a negative to appear as a small fish in a big pond. When this happens, it’s time to think about what you can do to make your potential customers, clients and partners really believe that you’re capable of what you say you are, and that you can punch above your weight.

Some of the best ways of doing this are the following:

Branding

Branding is hugely important for businesses of any size, even B2B, and if you want to appear as strongly as possible, then you’ll need a good one. If you really want to puff out your chest, then avoid using locations in your name, as this will narrow your perceived area. It’s also best to avoid any first names, such as “Dave’s Alloy Wheel Repair” as it’ll make you seem, or reveal if you indeed are, like a sole trader. Second names are generally no problem at all.

If your budget stretches to it, then hiring a marketing company to help you can be a worthwhile investment. Sometimes those first impressions are the difference between winning and losing a major contract, and once you’ve got a name and brand, it’s there for a long time. You might need a refresh, but it’s not like you’ll need to pay a monthly retainer.

Meeting

Meeting with clients is hugely important. Phone calls and video conferencing are obviously common and easy, but actually meeting face to face is unlikely ever to be completely avoided. Dress to impress, and where possible, bring another employee with you to make it look like you’re putting plenty of effort into the meeting, and that you’ve got staff to spare.

Location is important too – your tiny office at the back of an industrial estate is no place to woo national businesses. Rent a meeting room if necessary, as this will make a big difference to your appearance – they’re available everywhere these days, even in places like motorway service stations, so there’s no difficulty. Some of them are exceptionally well designed too.

Speaking

It’s never OK to lie or mislead about your business and its capabilities, but there are certainly ways of talking about it that can make it feel bigger and more important. Use ‘we’ often to show that you’re going to have multiple people working on whatever it is that you’re doing, and try to show that you’ll be delegating jobs. Don’t talk about difficulties of scale either – always keep the conversation to contracts and agreements that you can very easily manage, and be confident and open about that too.

The key is to talk about yourself in a way that makes your potential customers very confident that you’ll be able to do exactly what they need, regardless of whether you’re a small business or not. There’s a good guide on speaking at meetings here.

Photo credit: Paul Inkles/Flickr

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