One of the strangest things I’ve noticed over the years is how often independent business owners envy the wrong things.
They look at the national operators and see bigger fleets, deeper pockets, sophisticated IT systems and marketing budgets they could only dream of. It’s easy to understand why. On the face of it, the big players appear to have every advantage.
But I’m not convinced they do.
In fact, I think many SMEs already possess something crucial that the largest organisations could never achieve:
Speed.
Not the speed of their vehicles or production lines, but the rate at which they can make decisions, try something new, discover whether it works and, if necessary, change direction.
It’s a hugely competitive advantage. Which is why I find it so frustrating to see so many businesses voluntarily give it away.
Take AI as an example.
You can’t open LinkedIn or attend a business conference without somebody telling you that artificial intelligence is going to transform everything. Some of that is undoubtedly true. AI is already changing the way many businesses operate, and that is only going to continue over the foreseeable future.
But I sometimes wonder whether all the discussion about AI has distracted us from a more fundamental question:
Why do some businesses adopt change so quickly while others spend months talking about it?
The problem isn’t technology. It’s responsiveness.
Most business owners already know where the inefficiencies are. They know which customers generate more headaches than profit. They know which reports nobody reads, which manual processes waste time and which decisions have quietly sat on the to-do list for the last twelve months.
Knowledge is rarely the problem. Action is.
Large organisations often have perfectly legitimate reasons for moving cautiously. They operate with far greater visibility in highly regulated environments. Decisions have legal, financial and reputational consequences. Layers of governance are part of the price they pay for operating at scale.
That can be frustrating, but it’s understandable.
The danger of ‘wait and see’
What puzzles me is when I see small businesses behaving exactly the same way.
A twenty, fifty or hundred-person business has no steering committee. It doesn’t need three rounds of stakeholder engagement, executive approval or a convoluted business case that takes longer to write than the project itself.
The owner can make a decision over a cup of tea on a Tuesday morning and have people testing it out by Friday.
Yet how often do we hear the same response whenever a new opportunity, regulation or technology comes along?
“Let’s wait and see.”
Wait and see what?
Wait until somebody else proves it works? Wait until your competitors have already made the mistakes and learned the lessons? Wait until the market changes so much that you’re reacting instead of choosing?
Waiting feels safe because it doesn’t feel like making a decision. Especially a hasty one.
But it is still a decision, nonetheless.
It’s a decision to stand still while everyone else is learning and moving forward.
Speed is the SME advantage
I see this repeatedly in the waste and recycling sector, although it applies just as readily across manufacturing, engineering, construction… any production-based business
Every year brings another regulatory change, another shift in disposal markets, another squeeze on margins, or another technology that’s supposed to change the game. Some businesses begin exploring what it might mean almost immediately. They ask questions, run small trials and adapt as they learn.
Others seem determined to reach absolute certainty before doing anything at all.
The irony is that certainty usually arrives just after the profit margin within the opportunity has disappeared.
One of the reasons I enjoy working with SMEs is that they can transform in a matter of weeks, while a PLC wrings its hands for 6, 9, 12 months to achieve even a fraction of the business benefit.
But instead, I often see independent businesses behaving as though they’re waiting for permission from an oversight committee that doesn’t exist.
The biggest competitive advantage an SME has, isn’t lower overheads or a closer relationship with its customers, important though those things are.
It’s responsiveness: the ability to recognise what’s happening, make a sensible decision with the information available and get moving while everybody else is still discussing whether now is the right time.
Will their every decision be perfect? Of course not.
But my point is: those businesses will have learned something. While the ones that spent the same six months waiting for certainty will have learned nothing at all.
The businesses that will win
The businesses that thrive over the next decade won’t necessarily be those with the biggest AI budget or the fanciest software.
They’ll be the ones that spot change early, make sensible decisions and learn faster than everyone else. Competitive advantage increasingly belongs to the businesses that create the shortest distance between spotting a problem and acting on it.
Large organisations spend millions trying to become more agile.
SMEs already have that advantage.
The question is whether they’ll use it.
About Gerald Price
Gerald Price is a business change consultant and interim managing director specialising in business turnarounds, operational improvement and commercial performance, especially within the waste and recycling industry.
Having worked with operators across the sector, he regularly writes about leadership, strategy, waste policy and the commercial realities facing UK waste businesses.
More articles and insights can be found at www.gpcp.co.uk and https://www.linkedin.com/in/geraldprice/
