Trust is the new competitive advantage

Posted by Eamon in echolibre, industry, recession
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 14:11

Peter Bregman recently posted on Harvard Business blog about
“Why Small Companies Will Win in This Economy”.

It’s a great post, full of common-sense-optimism, that makes a change from the doom-and-gloom we’ve all seen of late. He talks about why decision makers are moving away form bigger companies as their service provider to smaller, more flexible companies. He argues that ultimately this comes down to trust between people, not brands:

Small is the new big. Sustainable is the new growth.
Trust is the new competitive advantage.

What stood out to me from this article is the following paragraph:

Big investment banks are burning — but lots of small boutique firms, each with ten to twelve people, are opening up. And they’re doing well. They’ve gone back to the fundamentals. Finding a niche in which they have value to add and deals in which they are experts. And then sitting across from other people in the deal, building the relationship, making reasonable commitments, and following through.

This resonated with me, because this is exactly what characterises our company — we’re a handful of talented developers, experts in PHP, who strive to build lasting relationships with our clients. We’re not looking to build the next <insert company name as appropriate>.  We’re building a company that offers expert PHP systems development, consultation and training, to other small and medium companies in Ireland, UK and beyond, and we’re not going away any time soon.

Thanks to Conor O’Neill (@conoro) of LouderVoice for spotting this article and tweeting about it.

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