On Monday October 9, 2006, Mitchell Stein meet with Small Business Fortune Magazine and www.Spotrunner.com, to discuss ways that small businesses can successfully compete against larger company's. The interview went for a couple of hours and a lot of great points were brought up. I will make sure to put a link to the article on-line once it available but I wanted to talk about some of the article today. Florist represent on of the largest small business groups in the United States with some 40,000 plus independent flower shops. It is amazing that there is very little support for such a large group. The issues that were discussed in the magazine were about ways the small flower shops can compete with larger company's. What was interesting to the gentleman doing the interview is how many florist belong to wire services that are competition. As an outsider it was very hard for him to understand why florist will belong to, support, and give business to an organization that is actually promoting business away from the local florist. His example was a well known old flower organization. When you walk into many flower shops in the United States you see their logo on books, posters, private internet sites, even on independent flower shops delivery vehicles. Yet this big "wire service" pays nothing in advertising (actually charges for the items that have their logo on them) and is daily competing against the local florist for business. He even pointed out how he went to this wire services corporate website and most of the items were "shipped" items, meaning that the local florist got 0% of the business. I tell you, it was hard to explain why we as florist belong to such an organization.
What I explained was that the existing wire services were the only option. That giving money to the Competition is a lot like small businesses shopping at Sams Club? All your doing is giving more money to Wal-Mart, who is putting your small business out of business. However, Sams Club or other warehouse stores are the only option as many manufactures do not sell to small shops or cost more to buy direct than it does to buy from Sams Club. I explained to him that the purpose of my blog and doing this interview was to get other florist to start thinking like he was, to have the local florist think of ways to compete against the big flower company's, and get them to ban together to create a better way of running the flower industry.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment