UNCONVENTION

A business strategy expert shares his ideas for helping small businesses excel.

Kaza opens his nonfiction debut with an account of his early efforts to help small businesses survive and flourish, describing how this commitment initially got him involved in the private equity lending group ForwardLine Financial, which was dedicated to getting small businesses successfully financed and prioritized a very personal, hands-on approach. All of this was going well, with both client businesses and ForwardLine thriving, when the Covid-19 pandemic struck. The author prioritized helping ForwardLine’s customers over its bottom line, and as a result, many small businesses came through the worst of it intact when they might otherwise have been forced to shut their doors permanently. Even so, almost 30 percent of ForwardLine’s customers had gone out of business as a result of the pandemic, and many of the survivors were struggling to survive. Told by friends that “Big businesses always win. Scale always wins,” Kaza found himself wondering, “Are small businesses really destined to fail when faced with bigger competitors?” Pondering this question led him to develop what he calls “Underdog Principles” built around “positioning, proximity, and purpose” and designed to help small businesses compete with their larger rivals by embracing their differences and using them to craft innovative marketing strategies. He focuses his chapters on the stories of small businesses and the entrepreneurs who build them, people who are often “not just CEOs, they’re also the janitors, receptionists, accountants, and HR managers all rolled into one.”

Running through all of Kaza’s advice and examples is a refreshingly sincere empathy, a genuine interest in the stories and needs of small businesses that one might not expect to find in money managers and loan officials. Whether it’s “a quality place to eat” or “I need my 5,000 psi hydrostatic drive to be rated for both high and sub-zero temperatures,” the author always tries to put himself in the shoes of the customers. “Don’t worry about matching your cost analysis exactly to the customer decision journey stages,” he advises his readers. “Focus instead on where you can track concrete numbers, such as how many clicks your ads get or how many trials convert to sales.” Most of this advice revolves around his “Underdog Principles,” which are winningly simple: positioning (having a well-defined customer base), purpose (sometimes focusing on a problem that needs solving rather than “conventional business metrics”), and, perhaps most important of all, proximity (knowing your customers well enough to understand what motivates their decisions). The homespun quality of Kaza’s business anecdotes helps to underscore the viability of these principles. For instance, the author tells of meeting body shop owner Mike because his own car needed work, and Mike’s Yelp reviews were superb because he’d taken to asking satisfied customers to leave reviews. “Sharing your personal story or business challenges with your customers can feel a little risky,” Kaza writes, but “The trust you build as a small business owner is your most valuable asset.” This consistently personal tone fills the book with a sense of optimism that will be much appreciated by entrepreneurs and small business owners at all stages of the game.

An optimistic, highly personal game plan for helping small businesses thrive.