Small Business Scope.
Why Does It Matter?

This website is written for a small business audience. It is focused on a small business scope or reach.

Why is it important to define your small business scope? Because it is important to identify and understand your business reach, especially from a strategic management perspective.

As small business owners, with a clear understanding of your scope, you will be better able to develop, and achieve, your strategic business plans.

Here's an example of how this website defines small business by its reach or scope:

First, what’s the definition of small business? There are many. For the sake of simplicity: at least 1 employee (yourself) and less than 100. For those who are starting a small business or who already operate a small business, scope is important.

Some might argue that defining a small business as up to 100 staff is too big. Okay.

We could agree on that.

However there are companies with 99 staff who don’t have staff departments (for example, to consider the role of human resources ) or marketing departments, or quality departments, or customer services departments, or planning departments. And so on.

Or if they have departments for those functions, they might be large enough to handle the day to day activities (e.g. the Human Resources department is responsible for recruiting employees and providing management with support when firing employees is necessary) but doesn’t have time to build the wage structure and compare to the outside world or they might not have time to write the job descriptions, etc. - the department might not be large enough to take on what might be called foundation or structural work.

So, we’ll define the scope of this website as one that meets the needs of businesses without large staff departments.

And since we can make our own rules – we will allow scope ‘creep’ (usually a negative connotation but in this case think of it as a positive). Allowing small business scope creep into how we've defined this audience for this site, allows us to define small in a very liberal way.

So, to conclude this example, we will use our definition of scope to define who this website is trying to reach:

We specialize in providing business and marketing effectiveness services and strategies to small business owners.

If you are considering how to start a business, strategic planning will help you better consider your business scope by focusing on marketing segmentation and target marketing.

How do you define your business scope? What audience or market do you serve?

You must make sure you clearly understand your definition as you manage your small business growth. Defining your small business market will ensure that you are managing it.

Return from Small Business Scope to Managing.

Or Return from Small Business Scope to More-For-Small Business.