Ashish Kothari argues small businesses beat giants like Amazon through proximity and personalization. A CEO handwriting birthday cards, or any genuine human touch, matters because 52% of employees feel their employer doesn't care. Small gestures are the advantage big companies can't replicate at scale.
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I spoke to a thousand small and medium sized businesses a couple months ago at the Jim Moran Institute for Small Businesses. And I'll tell you the big question that they had as I talked to them. And the big worry was this fear of becoming obsolete. How do we compete against Amazon, Burger King and others that are paying $25 an hour? And through my research, the biggest way is that they have the competitive advantage of proximity. So when you go and work for a large corporation, I always say J.P. morgan or you, you could say Amazon. I'm not going to meet Jamie Dimon if I'm at the front desk. Rarely. I don't know if I'll have an opportunity to be mentored by him just by the sheer size of the organization. But if you a small or medium sized business, you do have that opportunity. I was at Indiana, at a manufacturing company called Jergens. And the CEO there, he writes birthday cards to everyone, to their spouse, to their children, handwritten. At larger companies you can't do that. But when you go to that statistic of 52% saying, I don't feel like my employer cares about me, it's the, the small things that actually matter. The small and medium sized businesses can operationalize.
