There is a lot of advice and help out there for businesses just starting out – small businesses, in other words. However, this term doesn’t just refer to when you’ve only recently begun your entrepreneurial journey; it can still apply after years if you feel like you’re a much more local or small-scale organization compared to some of the titans of your industry.

It’s a helpful distinction as the priorities and experiences of these two opposing brands can be wildly different. However, where does the line between these two stages blur? If you know that, you can begin to understand where you really stand.

When You Expand?

The obvious answer might be that once you have more than one branch of your business, it’s hard to consider yourself a small business anymore. This might not be true, and you have to think about how you stand in contrast to your competitors. If your industry is one where the main juggernauts are companies that have multiple branches, having two might not mean much in comparison. However, if you’re in an industry where small businesses are a much more predominant factor, this expansion could have a more immediate impact on how people perceive you in this regard.

That small business factor might not be something that you want to give up, even when it clashes with your desire to expand and accumulate as many resources as possible. There is even the risk and the anxiety that this expansion might start to alienate you from your audiences – especially if you feel as though that personable link between you was one of your most valuable assets. In this case, it’s important to understand exactly what it is about your brand that audiences connect with. If you do that, you can try and make sure that these expansions complement and make allowances for this rather than overwrite it.

When You Master Digital Spaces?

Modern businesses are keenly aware of how to navigate digital spaces and utilize them to their professional advantage. While not every business is so reliant on digital spaces (such as more physical lines of work like construction), it will always be a benefit to hold a presence within them. Being active on social media platforms can help audiences discover your brand through your posts being shared, and further investigation will then expose them to your marketing. From here, they might make their way to your website which you’ve likely linked into these pages. Alternatively, people might be drawn to your central website after being exposed to your SEO content, meaning that all roads lead to Rome.

With that in mind, it’s important that your website is as robust as possible so that audiences are suitably impressed when they arrive. Ensuring that you’ve interwoven your branding with the aesthetic of the website can help it to feel like a true hub of what you have to offer, and that will only become more true once you’ve ensured that all the relevant information about your brand is available in some form here.

You also want navigation and functionality to be as impressive as possible, something that can be managed with the right tools like APIs and an API management platform. After all, it’s not just enough to utilize these kinds of tools; you want visitors to your website to see that you’re capable of using them effectively and without any sort of security issues impeding them. At this point, you might start to shed the title of small business but in a way that speaks to your professional standing within the wider industry.

When Your Team Grows?

When your business is a local outlet that seems more humble and more directly tied to one person’s ambitions, there is a powerful and relatable factor that can draw people in. Audiences might want to support you and your cause, especially if they feel like they know you as a person. This isn’t something that’s necessarily lost once you start to hire people. A small team can be just as familiar, especially if you use your digital platforms to draw attention to each of them, allowing your audiences to get to know them in a more comfortable kind of way.

However, once this arc continues upwards, it becomes easy to see that this thread might get lost eventually. After all, it’s much more difficult to relate in the same way to a billionaire CEO, and if that’s your eventual goal, you’re going to have to accept the fact that this personable connection will be something that you lose along the line.

Small Business Branding and Self-awareness

By that same metric, once you begin to eclipse other businesses in your industry, the mantle of the underdog might well and truly have shifted to another. Once you represent the larger business within that competitive conflict, a shift in audience perception might occur. In order to not lose that kind of connection as soon as this shift occurs, you might have to recognize what element of your branding is valuable here so that you can hang on to it.

Of course, if you’re claiming that you’re just a small and homegrown business at the point where that ship has clearly sailed, this kind of branding might only damage the perception that your audiences have of your brand, but if you instead keep to your values and exhibit a degree of self-awareness about your position, that could change the game entirely.

After all, your audiences likely won’t want to abandon you the second you start to show signs of broader success. They supported you for a reason, and they want to know that their support makes a difference. If your customers believe in what you’re providing, signs that you’re not going anywhere will only come as positive news to them. Through that same lens, doing what you can to understand what they want from you so that you can continue to provide it even as your circumstances change can help you hang on to this support.