When you think about large corporations, what do you think about them? Maybe these organizations are massive. They have 1,000, 2,000, or more employees. That’s what I used to think as well.
Until I had a conversation with a group of IT professionals.
We discussed the patch management and vulnerability tool Action1. One of my long-time friends recommended we use it at my organization. I put it off for a while but began using It a few months ago.
Photo by Blake Wisz on Unsplash
The big push was that Action1 was free for organizations with less than 100 workstations they needed to deploy to. That was great for our organization. We have less than that for our workstations.
It kind of made me feel like a small business.
I recently logged into Action1 and noticed something had changed. There was a notice that you could now deploy the Action1 agent to 200 workstations for free!
Wow! That is great for small businesses. It’ll help a few smaller companies out, right?
Wrong…
Maybe You’re Not So Small After All
I love to investigate new information. As the discussion between the person who recommended the software tool, a couple of friends, and I continued, I wanted to see how many businesses this could cover.
Know what I found out? If your organization has 250 or fewer employees, you’re lumped in with 89% of businesses. According to NAICS, there are 17,769,699 businesses that they cover. Of that, 1,830,128 are uncoded for employee count. Then, for businesses over 250 people, you have 77,391.
So…
While you may not lead an organization with hundreds of thousands of employees, you’re not alone. A very small number of organizations hit employee counts of over 250. In fact, according to NAICS, there’s only 0.28% of businesses over that number.
You’re not the small fish in the big pond with lots of larger competitors. You’re an average-sized fish in a big pond of competitors of about the same size as you.
Small And Mighty
You may have been told you need to grow your headcount, find a large pool of talent, or some other lie about growing your organization. That’s not what’s going to make you grow.
What’s going to make you grow is using the talent you currently have well. You can be small and might when you focus on who you have on your team, their strengths, and where they need to focus their energy.
If you want to become a mighty competitor in your market, it’s not likely to come from your size. It’s going to come from the quality team members you have and how you’re using them.
You don’t have to grow in size. You have to grow in skills and abilities. As you can see, you’re in a pond where over 99% of your competition is close to your size.
People just aren’t talking about it. They’re not letting onto the fact that most organizations never get above 250 employees.
But they are small, mighty, and agile. They can move swiftly, appropriately, and effectively.
Size won’t make you more effective. Using the skills of your employees will.
Go, be small and mighty.
