If You’re Serious About Growth, You’ll Need These 6 Big-Company Tools

You’ve finally broken loose from the big organization and started your own business. You’re enthusiastic about the possibilities of charting your own course and pursuing your own interests in your own way, free of the roadblocks and obstacles of a big company bureaucracy.

But in your haste to leave all the trappings of that big organization behind, you may be missing out on some of the methods and techniques big companies use to get things done right and manage risks.

Here are a few big company methods you can adopt and scale to fit your new venture.

Assemble your own team of outside advisors. Big companies have people throughout the organization who bring specific expertise in areas of the business whose job it is to review proposals and ask tough questions. You can get the same benefit by bringing in friendly business owners in allied and related industries, or from completely different businesses who understand what you’re trying to do and want to help. Don’t wait for your customers, competitors and outside investors to point out the flaws in your business model.

Use sophisticated financial modeling and shark-tank style business case exercises. It used to be that only large organizations could afford to have access to good financial modeling tools. Now there are many packages out there you can use. What about getting help from an intern from the MBA program at a local university?

Use outside attorney and accountant for tough pre-emptive reviews. Big companies don’t wait to be surprised by outside agencies and regulators. Bring in your own team to do model audits to find the flaws before you go live.

Use “lateral thinking” to have team members bring perspectives of various stakeholders. Look at one of the biggest challenges of people working in big organizations: Breaking through the “noise” of multiple departments with different interests competing for limited enterprise resources, pursuing their own interests and sharp-shooting others. But a positive consequence of this competition is that you see your own project from an outside perspective right there inside the company! You can get the benefit of these points of view with exercises based on the lateral thinking methodology pioneered by Edward deBono, where members of your team alternately take on the positions of proponents, naysayers who want to stop it, builders, servicers, customers, cautious skeptics, competitors, etc.

Use a formal idea vetting process that separates the proposal from the proposer. Too often in smaller organizations, the person proposing an initiative becomes closely identified with the proposal — “Bob’s Idea,” “Alicia’s Deal,” — and ends up defending it instead of allowing it to take shape naturally. Big companies have so many “cooks in the kitchen” that initiatives get pushed and prodded with various people playing different roles as it moves along in vetting and development. By being mindful of this effect, you can make sure all ideas are put “on the workbench” for everyone to work on. That way, you can mitigate excessive ownership and the resulting personal bias that can corrupt the fair evaluation of important innovative ideas.

Align with larger organizations as joint venture partners in strategic initiatives. The visibility and market presence of a big partner can help bring your message to a broader audience. Start with a modest, low-risk project like a joint seminar or webinar or writing articles on each other’s blogs. Then try a small project together. See what works and build on it.

Sure, it’s great to be free to call your own shots. But there’s no reason you can’t use some of the tools, methods and techniques used successfully by big companies who have to get things done with lots of competition, regulatory scrutiny and a lot of dollars and reputation risk at stake.