Written by: Tom Vanden Heuvel, CEO and President of Kemco Systems
Having spent my career building teams in the context of being a smaller company in the land of giants, I am often called to the story of David and Goliath.
The story closes (spoiler alert) with the underdog, David, slaying the much stronger and better armed Goliath with a mere slingshot and stone.
The water industry is similarly bifurcated into the large, but few, Goliaths and small, but numerous, Davids.
With all the Goliaths dominating the airtime, why would a superstar candidate join a David?
The megadeals grab the headlines (Veolia/Suez, Dow/DuPont, Ecolab/Nalco, etc.) but the little deals are orders of magnitude more common. Why?
Smaller companies are far more innovative and closer to customers. We are the incubators of technology and are compelled to know the customer better. We can take educated risks. We are the domain experts in the narrow niches that drive profitability and profoundly impact a customer.
We are not the underdogs, but rather wildly competent and competitive companies that Goliath continues to under-estimate. Don’t tell them, but we LOVE that. While they are in meetings all day, we are loading our slings with the next rock looking to out-service our customers.
You can leave a lasting imprint on a smaller company. A large company can quickly fill the seat that has just been vacated. At a David company, you get to build your own career path and you are never more than a few steps from those who make the most important decisions. At a David, you wear many hats, affording you the opportunity to learn the business and appreciate the customer from nearly every angle.
It’s not all rosy, we don’t have ping pong tables or free snacks in the breakroom. We don’t have private jets or fancy offices. David slept in the field. We work hard and reinvest into the business, not the superfluous.
In the end, remember, Michelangelo’s masterpiece is not of Goliath.
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