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Small Is Big

Small Is Big

I fired TruGreen, which is the world’s worse lawn company, a bureaucratic, national oaf of a operation. The local manager refuses to talk to customers or to acknowledge bad work. I’d bet he needs help finding the rest room.

I found a local guy who owns his own company. He kept following up with me since I was traveling, made an appointment, looked over the property, told me what he would do and how he’d coordinate with my gardener. He cited a price and I accepted it and we shook hands.

Please don’t tell me that small businesses can’t compete. They can compete when they think big while the monoliths are thinking small. Or can’t think at all.

And by the way, turn your lawn into quicksand before you think about ever giving money to TruGreen.

Written by

Alan Weiss is a consultant, speaker, and author of over 60 books. His consulting firm, Summit Consulting Group, Inc., has attracted clients from over 500 leading organizations around the world.

Comments: 2

  • Douglas Squirrel

    February 27, 2019

    I just switched lawyers (“solicitors” as we say here in England). The old firm is a well-known monolith that sounds like your description of TruGreen – stodgy, inward-looking, totally unresponsive to customer need. For example they insisted that I have to have a signed, witnessed contract for every customer, and unsigned Ts and Cs were completely worthless. New guy is a solo practitioner who uses unsigned Ts and Cs himself and immediately deleted the need for witnessing from the contract template without me even asking, which already saves me a noticeable admin overhead. He understands what risk means and why I might want to take a small shortcut with minimal exposure to get a significant business gain. He thinks big and had no trouble taking my business away from the big firm on the spot.

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