Recent headlines:

The ABC Sneers at Small Business

Posted by Greg on Sep 14th, 2008

As the self appointed mouth piece of state enterprise (is that an oxymoron?), it is well known that the ABC deeply dislikes big business. Now it is showing what it thinks about small business in their new program “Very Small Business”.

This is a missed opportunity. The program could have shown how the little guy puts one over the bigger guy with clever use of limited resources and fast decision making that just by shear nerve gets them across the finishing line to beat a larger competitor.

I remember a bank ad about a small business (probably husband and wife) and the husband is in a small pokey, drab office in very casual attire talking to some exec in a city office tower trying to convince them to use his services. The exec says he will round up his board for a teleconference in 5 minutes. Clearly the small business guy is panicked. He calls out to his wife that they are to have a video conference. She rushes in with a business shirt and tie. We see he is just wearing a pair of shorts as he is changing. He clears the desk contents onto the floor, and he pulls down the blind behind it and there is a painted image of Sydney Harbour on it. The call comes in and he looks very professional and cool after the frantic activity in the seconds before. Then you see his wife sidle round the back, avoiding the view of the web camera, to retrieve an old pizza box.

That’s the sort of fun that happens in small business.

In Very Small Business, the owner is a sleaze and basically dishonest. The writers have come up with an unlikely hero, a depressed writer who works for this small business. Give us all a break!

Small business owners have lots of great stories on how they succeeded against the odds with some highly inventive strategies. If you are not honest, you don’t last long as customers won’t deal with you and you get a bad reputation, which is the fastest way to go out of business. Small Business Owners have to think fast, work hard, and have a great sense of humour to out manoeuvre their larger competitors

With small business employing 50% of the private sector employees and responsible for 70% of the employment growth in recent years, you would have thought this is something that the ABC would want to celebrate rather than just sneer at.

But I forgot, it is their ABC.

Dr Greg Chapman