How can a small business win over well-funded alternatives?

I have spent the past 4 years working with small and medium enterprise owners and startup founders in India and recently in Singapore. Without a second thought, the top challenge that every such enterprising individual faces is that of growth. Let me re-write the word GROWTH in capital letters and bold.

Why such a bold emphasis on GROWTH? Its simply because there is so much noise that has been created by companies with extraordinary monetary spend that it becomes all the more difficult for emerging businesses to get discovered.

I have seen the fire, grit, determination, ambition as I spent time with these fantastic self-funded, bootstrapped founders and owners. Their ideas, vision and the ambition to create greater good and wealth for the society at large are worth sharing. 

But how do they get these ideas to spread?

This became my purpose. I saw the dots getting connected in hindsight. I hence started a company to help SMEs build powerful narratives. I started with the core belief that 'a powerful narrative will lead to more empathetic and authentic conversations'. This is precisely what happened.

We built a framework that we share with our customers. All of them are either SME owners OR professionals that want to create a strong narrative on Linkedin about their careers.

Today we are letting this fundamental framework in the open such that it could be of value for many amazing people that are fighting the battle but they get feel frustrated and the only reasoning they offer is the lack of money for marketing/ branding to grow.

A powerful narrative always leads to authentic and meaningful conversations. These conversations are exactly what every SME owner must aim to have a lot more of. This is your unfair advantage. This is how you win even when you have the well funded alternatives going insane with advertising and proving their excel sheet vanity metrics right.

I wish every SME owner and founder of an emerging enterprise at least 50X more conversations in 2018!

About The Author: Paritosh Sharma is the CEO, UNCV. I am also the author of India's first business book on Patanjali - Patanjalize Your Brand.