B2B CFO® provides permanent part time CFO advisory services to small and medium sized businesses.  Our partners average over 25 years of experience in business and industry.  I happen to have significant experience working in large Fortune 500 companies but also have significant experience working with small and medium sized entities. 
  I can appreciate how the owners of small and medium sized businesses can feel challenged when they are facing off against large mulitnational businesses that have seemingly endless resources.  But small and medium sized entities (SMEs) have significant advantages that are unique to them, that if used to full advantage, can make SMEs formidable competitors.
  When I was growing up, my parents started a roadside vegetable  stand selling some vegetables that my father grew on a half acre of land behind our house.   Outwardly, this business looked unsophisticated but behind the scenes my relatively uneducated parents were operating a significant and sucessful business.
  We lived on a busy street and cars just kept stopping.  Demand outstripped supply - so my mother decided to buy inventory from local farmers in the Southern new Jersey area where we lived.  She would buy corn from a farmer that had 40 acres in Medford, NJ that was a large supplier to supermarket chains and tomatoes from a farmer in Swedesboro, NJ that she met at the Swedesboro farmer's auction.  She built relationships with these vendors and solidified relationships with them so that they became reliable suppliers who always provided us reasonable prices.
  This solidified the supply chain and insured that our goods were always fresher than our competitors. 
  Customer seemed to like the image that we represented - a small family owned business where the sales staff (my brothers sisters and me) were always polite and carried our customers purchases from a aged picnic table to their cars.  In reality, we had significant inventory hidden out of sight and registered significant sales for a business of this type.
  My mother (the CFO/COO) always made sure that our prices were lower than other farm markets in the area.  Supermarkets weren't really competitors as their fresh produce was 1 or 2 days older than ours - but we always made sure our prices were lower than theirs.
  My parents would rarely invest in CAPEX (capital expenditures), they preferred that the equipment that we used looked old - so that customers wouldn't feel like we were profiting too much from our business.
  Our customer base remained incredibly loyal and we had some customers for, literally, decades.  Although, my parents never articulated it, they were very strategically minded and looked after the image of our business very sucessfully.  They acheived excellent financial results, kept fixed costs low and surely generated incredible return on equity statistics.
  I think this story highlights some of the difference between huge businesses and smaller ones.
  Large business can have incredible resources at their disposal - both financial and human resources.  They are powerful and are able to forge alliances that give them an operational, financial and/or strategic advantage.  But they are often slow to act, inept at strategic planning and bureaucratic.
  Many times in my career I have compared the Fortune 500 company that I was working for to my family's roadside vegetable stand.  I was often amazed at how slow the Fortune 500 company was at seizing low hanging fruit and how poor their strategic planning was - sometimes they didn't know what they wanted a particular unit or geographic region to be from a strategic standpoint. 
  Many attributes of a SME can actually be advantageous versus a larger entity.  Smaller companies can be nimble and can act quickly.  They can often operate sucessfully under the radar gaining advantage without the notice of competitors.  And most importantly, they are closer to their customers (or should be).  They can convert on customers wants/concerns/needs/desires much faster than a larger bureacratic entity which needs to have memos written and conduct meetings and conduct research before taking action.
  By identifying competitors weaknesses, acting quickly and attacking they can acheive great sucess.  Their closeness to their customers allows them to do "real time" research that a large competitor can't.
  To position yourself to compete with larger competitors, make sure that you have a solid (albeit small) team that allows you to fully function from a financial, operational and strategic and operational basis.  When you see an opportunity or an exposure, fully assess the situation with your senior advisors and act quickly to exploit opportunities as quickly as possible.
The inclusion of a B2B CFO® partner onto your senior team can give you the financial expertise and strategic insight that you need to maximize the performance of your operation.   Our partners, who have over 2500 years of cumulative experience, (including significant merger and acquisition related experience), are part of the largest US firm providing services on a part-time basis to closely-held companies with annual revenues of as much as US$75 million.
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Provided By: Vincent Leusner of B2B CFO