Remember, Being the Little Guy Has Advantages

Noah Rowles got interested in technology as a youngster, teaching computer classes to his peers in junior high school. He developed computer programs for a small software company until about a year ago, when he took his creativity and a batch of ideas for new, easy-to-use software utilities and started his own firm. As an entrepreneur, Rowles has learned that smaller companies have advantages. And he’s figured out how to leverage those advantages while he grows his company to the next stage. He was interviewed by freelance writer Karen E. Klein.

So many entrepreneurs I talk to are in a hurry to make their companies big, and have that security. But I think with a big company there are things you lose.

The bigger companies have already established their slice of the pie. For a small company, if we can take even a very small percentage of the pie, it means a lot to us. When you’re small, even if you pull only a small piece of market share away from the big guys, you can grow it. There’s no way for you to go except up. If you leverage the little bit you’ve got properly, and you strive for perfection and make the right decisions, you can use it to leapfrog ahead by funding marketing and development that keeps growing your slice.

A small company can research and implement ideas a lot faster than a larger company can. The bigger companies have the manpower and the staff, but, practically, they don’t really turn new ideas around quickly because of the politics, bureaucracy and the hoops they have to jump through to get onto the market or supersede what they’ve already got there. The larger companies have established user bases and they have to convince their users to relearn something every time they upgrade. A smaller company can come up with an exciting, fresh, new product that’s attractive.

One area we’ve used to our advantage as a small company is the Internet. If you’ve got a product you can market there, it allows you to appear just as big and provide just as much service as the big guys. If you concentrate on providing a really customer-oriented and service-oriented Web site and maintain a good image there, the Internet can level the playing field for you considerably.

Our Web site is our main gateway to our customers. We concentrated on making it that from the beginning. Now, we’re seeing a lot of the bigger guys playing catch-up with their Web sites, but it’s not hurting us. In fact, it’s helping us. As people get on the Internet looking for the well-known stores, they come across us too. And they become comfortable buying online, which helps us also.

Another thing our smaller size helped with was in designing our System Mechanic software, which finds and fixes problems on your PC. It’s positioned in the same market as some very prominent, established products. However, we surveyed a lot of people and found that although most of them were buying the bigger products, a lot said they were not satisfied and they only bought them because there was no alternative.

We looked into why they didn’t like what they’d purchased, what they did and didn’t want from the product, what they’d change, and we concentrated on their responses when we did our design. We also concentrated on including tools that are relevant to right now, which means a lot of Internet-related tools.

System Mechanic has been a revolutionary product for us. We introduced it three or four months ago and it has tripled our sales. We don’t sell a million copies a day, but we’ve definitely taken a slice of the pie after only a few months.

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If your business can provide a lesson to other entrepreneurs, contact Karen E. Klein at the Los Angeles Times, 1333 S. Mayflower Ave., Suite 100, Monrovia, CA 91016 or at [email protected]. Include your name, address and telephone number.

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At a Glance

Company: You Name It Promotions

Sales executive: Steven Perlmuter

Nature of business: Sales of promotional and gift items

Location: 911 Havenhurst Drive, No. 4, West Hollywood 90046

Web site: https://www.ynip.com

E-mail address: [email protected]

Founded: 1987

Employees: 8

Annual revenue: $2 million