6 Things Your Small Business Can Learn from Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

Virtually all companies that have grown to become household names started as small businesses where at some point, an idea put into action catapults the venture into the corporate equivalent of celebrity status. In today’s complex business environment, corporations have had to be even more innovative and creative, while retaining tried-and-true strategic thinking to succeed.

Phil Simon, author of The Age of the Platform: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Have Redefined Business says these innovative businesses share several common threads. “They embraced platform strategies really well, which is really the central message of the book. They built up their platforms and added different features or offerings.” The lessons that can be learned by these companies are applicable to any business, not just those in the high-tech or digital space, says Simon.

Keep reinventing yourself. In the Age of the Platform, companies that constantly reinvent themselves lead the pack. Keep adding planks to your platform. Start a newsletter. Become an expert at an online industry forum. Add new services or features to your suite of offerings. Find an underserved market niche and modify your product/services to fill their need. Write a white paper. Team up with a complementary business and share customers. Revamp your website. Whatever you do, don’t stand still. The moving target survives.  “As for when it’s time to do it, I would argue that you are better off doing it too soon than too late,” asserts Simon. “Companies like Microsoft that have been, traditionally, very late to things like search or cloud computing are trying to play catch up.”

Curate your customers. Apple curates many passionate users and turns them into partners (app developers for their iPhone and iPad) who pay back profits. How might your customers generate profit for you? Maybe you offer a reward for referring a new customer. Or create a wiki that enables customers to suggest new product lines. Think of new ways to get your customers expanding your brand for you. In the Age of the Platform, the fundamental relationship between a business and its customers is changing. “Just remember that you’re never going to make everybody happy and there is a kind of customer you’d want to go for,” says Simon. “When Facebook has 845 million users and it makes a change to one of its features, and it ticks off 1% of them, that’s a pretty good batting average, but you still have 8.5 million people who are upset.”

Let others’ platforms do the work. There are free and

low-cost tech tools designed to build or expand your platform that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Content management systems like WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, and others enable you to add planks such as blogs, plugins, widgets, integrated social networks, podcasts, videos, etc. Groupon can bring customers to your business. Salesforce.com enables a small company to act and operate like a big one. Sites like eLance allow you to connect with low-cost specialists of almost any vocation. All of the popular social media sites offer great free branding tools. Sites like Kickstarter enable entrepreneurs to test new product ideas in advance.

 

Don’t be afraid to expand into unchartered territory. “What if Google had been satisfied with just being a search engine, or Apple had only made computers?” asks Simon. “Great platform companies understand that the more high-quality services and products you offer, the more customers and growth opportunities you’ll attract.” He says diversifying invites serendipity and makes your company more resilient to unexpected changes in a market. Find something your company does really well and then use that as a starting place for a brand new endeavor. Perhaps you translate all of your marketing materials into Russian to serve the local Ukrainian community. “You never know which new path will lead to unforeseen success.”

Be sticky. Attracting customers with your great products and services is step one. “Getting them to stay with you — and only you — is the ultimate goal,” asserts Simon. He points to Amazon.com’s launch of the Kindle Fire as an example. The product made it easier for users to shop at Amazon.com and consume media and entertainment at Amazon rather than anywhere else. He suggests small business owners asking the following: “How can your business lure in customers and keep them there? With amazing customer service, follow-up, regular email specials, or contests? With interactive features at your website, birthday coupons, or preferred customer perks? Make it hard for your customers to want to go anywhere else.” He also recommends using existing platforms as Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, or Pinterest.

Move quickly, and make small bets. If you see an emerging need or trend in your industry, be the first one on your block to blog about it, ask your customers about it, and turn it into a new offering. You don’t have to sink a lot of money into this new endeavor, but you do need to act decisively to beat your competitors. The worst that can happen is you’ll fail. But you’ll know how to improve it before any of your competitors do. Being first fearlessly is a characteristic of successful platform companies. “

Merck had put out a drug called Vioxx that cost over $1 billion. All of a sudden the FDA shut it down and there were law suits stemming from the people taking it and dying or having heart attacks,” says Simon. “If you’ve got a digital product you can fix it seamlessly. You can turn it off seamlessly. Your ability, now, to make a change, that’s why to me the costs of failure are a lot smaller.”

Small business is BIG BUSINESS at the 2012 Black Enterprise Entrepreneurs Conference + Expo hosted by Nationwide, May 23-26, at the Hilton Chicago Hotel in Chicago, IL. Expect innovative sessions, high-powered speakers, and an early peek at the products, trends, and services you’ll need to stay ahead of the curve. Beat the March 16 Early Bird deadline to get a $200 registration discount at www.blackenterprise.com/ec/! And be sure to nominate your company or another business for our Small Business Awards! Want to pitch your business idea and win $10,000? Don’t miss the chance to enter our Elevator Pitch Competition before March 30 to qualify for the $10,000 grand prize. To register and find out more, visit www.blackenterprise.com/ec/