Making a Little Company Look Big

Making a Little Company Look Big

At the time, Ms. Ford was working on the staff of a property management company, and the last thing she wanted her customers to think was that she was operating the business during her lunch hour.

So to create the impression that the company was bigger, she searched for an answering service that used live operators. Customers would call Ms. Ford’s home phone number and immediately be forwarded to the service. “The operator would say, ‘Let me see if she’s available’ and try my cell,” Ms. Ford recalled. “If I could take the call, I would.”

Eric Siegel, a lecturer in management at the Goergen Entrepreneurial Management Program at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said, “Perception in the marketplace is a significant factor to success.”

These days, it may be easier than ever to pull off this feat, thanks to technological advances. Companies can produce their own polished marketing materials, use far-flung virtual assistants to answer phone calls, design sleek Web sites and the like. Even the use of e-mail helps. “Yesterday’s meeting is today’s e-mail,” Mr. Siegel said. “You can have a little hole in the wall office and no one would know.”

Ms. Ford’s clients had no idea they were speaking to a part-time, one-person operation. Two years later, she quit her job to run the business full time. But she kept the service for after-hours calls, because she believed clients liked the personal touch. It has paid off. According to Ms. Ford, revenue from the company, which now has six employees, has more than doubled every year since its start.

To build a successful company, entrepreneurs need to play a variety of roles — visionary, sales representative and morale builder, to name a few. But, in some cases, especially in the early years, they may need to play another, less obvious one: illusionist. That means finding resourceful ways, like renting temporary office space or using answering services, to make themselves seem larger and more firmly established than they may actually be. Of course, no matter how adept their sleight-of-hand, it will not work unless they are delivering the goods.

The most common way to tap the Internet’s power is probably to design a sophisticated Web site, with all the bells and whistles of a bigger company’s offering.

Nick Nanton, a lawyer in Orlando, has experimented with Web sites. Mr. Nanton, a partner with the law firm Dicks & Nanton, divides his work into areas of expertise and often forms separate limited liability corporations for handling each one, with a separate Web site. He has small-business consulting, along with trademark and entertainment law, and three or four more sites in the pipeline. And he does the same thing for clients. He has set up as many as 10 companies and Web sites for some clients.

“We isolate their strengths and spin them off into multiple Web sites,” he said. “We find people can’t help but be impressed.”

Another useful tool is the telephone, as Ms. Ford discovered. But, there are more-advanced systems that small-business owners are using. Four years ago, Anne Afshari and Laura Hagler, two registered nurses, started a company in Colorado Springs, called Exclusively RNs, to take after-hours calls for obstetricians and gynecologists.

At first, they worked with just one local office and they carried pagers. Then they began adding clients and decided they wanted a way for patients to feel that they were reaching an extension of their doctor’s office. So, they switched to a Web-based virtual private branch exchange, or PBX, system. Now, 20 nurses across the country, from Nevada to New Jersey, log onto the Web site and program their phones to be connected to the PBX system, which automatically routes patient calls to that number. Two to three nurses are usually on call at any one time.

Of course, low-tech approaches also work. Ms. Ford, for example, pays careful attention to visual presentation. Whenever members of her maintenance crew appear at a property, they drive a truck with her company logo, and they also wear a spiffy white uniforms featuring the logo. “Clients don’t want to deal with something that appears to be a mom-and-pop operation,” she said. “They don’t want to use someone who looks like they’re barely able to get it together.”

She’s even arranged for a certain telephone number, making sure to get a voice line ending in a double zero, with a fax number ending in zero-nine. “The implication is we have eight other lines,” she said.

Then there’s Evan Carmichael in Toronto, who runs a Web site, evancarmichael.com, providing advice to small-business owners. Four years ago, after starting up, Mr. Carmichael found himself facing a propitious opportunity: A local television station doing a story on chief executives of start-ups wanted to interview him for the segment, at his office. At that point, however, the firm consisted of Mr. Carmichael and one employee, operating out of a space he shared with another company.

Mr. Carmichael acted quickly. He called five friends, asking if they would like to be on TV. All they had to do was wear a suit and spend time at his office, looking like busy employees sitting in the background, while he was interviewed. Mr. Carmichael also asked his office mates if they would clear out and let him use the entire space, and they agreed. He didn’t even have to worry about the sign on the door, since there was only a suite number.

After the reporter conducted the interview, with Mr. Carmichael’s friends appearing to be working in the background, and the segment was broadcast, visits to his Web site jumped from 150 a day to nearly 1,700, he said. He also used the segment on his site and in promotional material. “I never said these people were my employees. They didn’t ask me,” Mr. Carmichael said. “I’d do it again.”

Not everyone believes that size is necessarily a hindrance for small businesses, however. James Blasingame, who runs a radio show and Web site called the Small Business Advocate, thinks it not only shouldn’t be hidden, but can even be a plus. He makes no attempt to hide the fact that his firm has just four employees.

“Big companies think it’s an advantage to deal with a smaller business,” he said. “It means you’re more nimble and resourceful than a bigger guy.”