GROWING A
SMALL DESIGN
BUSINESS IN THE
BIG CITY
REQUIRES
STRATEGY
Crafting Strategy For A Small Design Firm
With a city as dense as Chicago, what are the differentiating features
that can cause a small entrepreneurial start up company to stand out?
What is a good business strategy for the service based business and
what causes this business to be sustainable in this uncertain and
competitive environment? Through research of existing business
strategies and bset practices for crafting strategy we will write the
strategy for this company
GROWING A SMALL DESIGN BUSINESS IN THE BIG CITY REQUIRES STRATEGY
GROWING A SMALL
DESIGN BUSINESS IN
THE BIG CITY
REQUIRES STRATEGY
Crafting Strategy For A Small Design Firm
Making it Big in The City
With a city as dense as Chicago, what are the differentiating
features that can cause a small entrepreneurial start up company to
stand out? What is a good business strategy for the service based
business and what causes this business to be sustainable in this
uncertain and competitive environment? A quick search on Google
for design agencies will return 485,000 results in .66 seconds.
1 Slywotzky, The Upside . p. 42,
82
Rewards of Risk
The Risk You Face is
inversely proportional to
the relevant preparation
you do.
Winning companies devote
as much energy to
designing a great business
model as they do to
designing a great (service)
product.
Deep knowledge about
customer tastes and
behaviors turns the risk of
shifting customer
priorities into a major
growth opportunity.
GROWING A SMALL DESIGN BUSINESS IN THE BIG CITY REQUIRES STRATEGY
A focused strategy becomes increasingly attractive when the target market niche is big enough
to be profitable and offers good growth potential.1
For a company to succeed in delivering good performance and have a competitive edge over rivals, it
has to be well matched to the internal situation and underpinned by the resources, skills and capabilities
of its key human capital.2 In order to assess my companies’ capabilities it is important to understand the
technology, resources, partners for outsourcing and skills of the employees. The company has long
standing commitment to keeping up with the technologies that allow us to work most efficiently with
new internet technologies, especially since we need to keep up with the services we offer our customers
in technology, websites and social media. Our resources, office location, company vehicles, internal
ability to hire fulltime staff to keep books, perform business development, consistently build presence on
social media, are limited by monetary means but sufficient to complete the services we provide our
clients. We are able to outsource our printing needs to Staples, with whom we have built a relationship.
We also outsource our construction projects to a strategic partner, with whom we can trust to complete
work appropriately and above industry standards. In order to maintain our sharpness with new
technologies we also see that all employees attend training in new web based technologies, social media
and Adobe programs used to produce our creative product. A competence of ours is creating graphics for
branding; we have learned to perform it proficiently3. The distinctive competence to this skill that sets us
apart from rivals is that we answer the phone after 5pm and accept work over the weekends. For our
customers this may be important to having a looming deadline on a Monday, or a client meeting the next
day which require amazing graphical interface, online or in print. But the value of these tangible skills
1 Paraphrased from . Thompson: Crafting & Executing Strategy. P.145
2 Paraphrased from . Thompson: Crafting & Executing Strategy. P.143
3 Thompson: Crafting & Executing Strategy. P.93
2
GROWING A SMALL DESIGN BUSINESS IN THE BIG CITY REQUIRES STRATEGY
and assets has little value compared to the intangibles of branding our culture, a culture of better service
quality. “Great customer service increases customer loyalty and generates revenues and margins”4.
While personalized customer service is one of our strengths, there are weaknesses, shortcomings that
constitute competitive liabilities. Weaknesses can wipe out our company or be a stepping-stone to a new
process we create to remediate the problems. Our capabilities are hindered occasionally when one of our
partners has difficulty fulfilling our customer’s needs. Staples has occasionally had a broken large-scale
printer, or our construction team has had another project extend its time by a day, which pushed our
projects back a day. Although these things happen irregularly, our dependence on other vendors makes
us vulnerable as a company. One additional competitive deficiency is the entry of online design shops
offering cheaper and cheaper prices for graphic design and branding material services. How can a small
