This is a short thought gathering post after the first day of my trip to South Africa. Our company has been here for a couple of years and is having great progress.

Funny enough, once more we find out that international clients can’t understand how come our response times for fulfilling various requests are so short. Where their usual major supplier would need several weeks or even months to respond we bring back complete solutions with proper documentation in days. And, surprise, surprise, the quality is on our side.

So what is our secret?

There is none. Nor is this a result of a brilliant strategy. Well, you still need to be smart to keep a company together and performing, but it is not something that the big suppliers could not do. We are not smarter than them. Period.

Something else is at play here. Our team is small. Every expert in the team has to cover multiple areas of expertise. All of our experts also sit in the same office. They are experienced in solving problems of all sorts and they talk among each other all the time.

And it is not unique to my company either. The same case applies to many other Slovenian companies. Some of them are: Instrumentation Technologies, Cosylab, Dewesoft, Akrapović, Seaway, Pipistrel, Atech, Armeton, Elektronček, Zemanta. All of them are fast, nimble, innovative, and all of them are niche players and within the niche they became or are becoming global leaders.

Big multinational suppliers are better at covering mainstream needs of clients, yet they can’t be on the edge. They are not developing the knowledge as fast, they are not good at customising solutions, they are slow.

In Slovenia we are simply smaller. And therefore faster.