I have to prepare for a speech at a conference for small business owners. The topic is: How to compete against large companies. Any suggestion on how to make this a great speech would be helpful.

You may want to discuss the advantages and disadvantages of being a small company and how to maximize the advantages and minimize the disadvantages.

You may want to start off with an anecdote like:

"Like a lot of folks in the San Francisco area, Amadeo Peter Giannini was thrown from his bed in the wee hours of April 18, 1906, when the Great Quake shook parts of the city to rubble. He hurriedly dressed and hitched a team of horses to a borrowed produce wagon and headed into town - to the Bank of Italy, which he had founded two years earlier. Sifting through the ruins, he discreetly loaded $2 million in gold, coins and securities onto the wagon bed, covered the bank's resources with a layer of
vegetables and headed home...

"Giannini quickly set up shop on the docks near San Francisco's North Beach. With a wooden plank straddling two barrels for a desk, he began to extend credit 'on a face and a signature' to small businesses and individuals in need of money to rebuild their lives. His actions spurred the city's redevelopment."

Then you could say something like:

........Giannini responded like an entrepreneur although he worked for a large company. That is in 1906 not 2006, with Sarbanes and Oxley and the Enron scandal. Big companies are justifiably more cautious. This is where small non public companies come in ......

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www.smallbusinessforum.com

You may want to talk about how a small company can be a "big company" and compete head to head by:

• Using technology
• Hiring freelancers
• Having the same tools

etc

I think it would be interesting to give an historical perspective of small business versus large businesses i.e. in 1930 there were X companies with over 500 million in revenues and today there are X. In 1930s franchises did not exist today there are over X the growth of small businesses has mushroomed over the last X years. Why? Because they are successful competiting against larger companies.

Thanks for all your feedback! You gave me some great ideas and I will use them.