Real Life Pinellas

Not only do small business owners have fewer resources, they also have less money to throw around. Every purchase is a significant purchase. Every mistake could be a big one. They can’t afford significant cost overruns. They rarely compare actual expenditures versus a budget. They look at what’s been spent ver sus what’s left in the bank. A typical wheeler-dealer like Ray at Transitol is much more obsessed over actual cash outlays than his corporate counterpart, because every dime leaving the account is his money. A corporate manager may be evaluated for line item fiscal responsibility, but he is also evaluated for other things, too—management skills, teamwork, loyalty, attendance, ability to work with others, organizational skills, and sometimes even his golf game.
Ray, on the other hand, is evaluated by no one but his customers. And his customers don’t check off performance review forms and make recommendations for promotions. If satisfied, they pay him and then come back for more. If unsatisfied, they don’t. It’s always “show me the money” in the small business owner’s eyes, nothing else. Will your product or service put money into his account?

The real objective of a wily fox like Ray is to profitably operate his little business somewhere off the radar screen of the government and others that he believes want to take advantage of him. It’s unlikely that some 500-person organization in a large plant near the highway is unknown to you. But what about that little business of twenty people operating out of that building you thought was condemned? Who would have thought? There are lots of opportunities to make a few bucks out there, and you’re going to bump into creative little foxes everywhere making a go of it. Small companies like to occupy niches. There are niches so small that a larger corporation could never work in them successfully or turn a profit. But with low overhead and some fancy footwork, a resourceful little rascal like Ray knows how to eke out a few bucks and keep a couple of dozen people on the payroll.
A large corporate entity takes some raw materials and creates a highly specialized paper product that’s used throughout the world. But the results of this creation don’t end there. Making this product creates remnants. And the little company buys these remnants from the larger company, re-rolls it and then resells this scrap to an after-market of other unknown companies. It’s simply amazing, the many ways that small companies can make money.