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Go Small Businesses and Associations!

By Linh Hoang |June 27, 2014
Marketing

I recently read an article about the advantages of a large business. I wanted to take this chance to champion the small business/association. How do we turn these advantages for large businesses into advantages for our small staff associations?

Small business

Large Business Advantage 1: Stronger Brand Recognition

Large businesses have better brand recognition because they’ve been around longer and have the resources to promote themselves. I say, brand recognition is only good if your reputation is good. Let’s look at insurance giant AIG, for example. According to The Wall Street Journal, AIG is the least reputable company in the country for the fifth year in a row. Big companies with bad reps need lots of resources and money to bring their reputation back up. As a small business, you have more control over your brand and it arguably takes less effort to repair a damaged reputation if less people know about your reputation.

Large Business Advantage 2: Greater Human Resources

Large companies have more employees, allowing them to pool resources to accomplish the work. But more employees also mean paying more for their benefits and salaries and needing a bigger HR department to manage it all. Having more employees makes it hard to weed out the weak links, but in a smaller environment, it is easier to tell who isn’t pulling their weight. Being in a smaller work environment means each person gets to be diverse and do more varied work, unlike a large company where one person may do one task for the duration of their employment.

Large Business Advantage 3: Economy of Sale

Being big means you get to buy more, which often times means a mass quantity discount. For instance, you can save 10 cents per ream of paper if you buy 100 more reams.  Being small means I use less paper so I need to buy less. Since buying supplies from a big company and buying locally can be comparable in small amounts, I get to choose to if I want to buy locally from a small business to support my neighbors.

Large Business Advantage 4: Compensation Packages

Typically, large companies have more money to offer for salaries and benefits. What I find is that small associations typically do have pretty good benefits because they get to decide among themselves what those benefits should be. If there is a change in benefits, they are quicker to act on it whereas a large company may take longer to get benefits approved through the hierarchy. Sure the salary may not be as high as the execs in the large companies but remember, not everyone in the large company is making big bucks and your job is way more rewarding!

Linh Hoang

Linh has been with fusionSpan since 2012 and enjoys working with all of our non-profit clients on their CMS, AMS, website and event management needs. She heads up the professional services department, which strives to provide exceptional support and valuable consulting for projects and staff of any size. Linh also enjoys planning fun events for fusionSpan staff and loves any excuse to get us all together to eat and be merry! Prior to joining fusionSpan, Linh was the Membership Coordinator for the National Association of Workforce Development Professionals and Event Specialist for The Balcom Group. Linh has a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from George Mason

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