How Mighty Is Your Midsized Company?

Smaller firms often run too lean too long

Of the more than 10,000 business books that are published each year, few, if any, focus their attention on the all-but-forgotten midsized company. Armfuls of books on startups and Fortune-level organizational practices won’t help a business moving into young adulthood.

“There are almost 200,000 companies today with revenues between $10 million and $1 billion—midsized, as defined by Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business—and they account for about a third of U.S. GDP and a third of all U.S. jobs,” writes Robert Sher, author of the terrific new book, Mighty Midsized Companies: How Leaders Overcome 7 Silent Growth Killers (Bibliomotion, 2014).

This was news to me. Since I’ve never read a book exclusively focused on this market segment, and because every small business hoping to become a large company someday must first travel through the midsized stage, I wanted to learn more about the inherent perils of that journey, so I talked to Sher.

Matthew E. May: Why don’t more business authors and scholars cover midsized companies?

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Beware of Midgets

Not even the very big ones - car, oil, chemicals, energy, communication, food, etc. - can do without them, without their products, components, services. Since inception of outsourcing, midsized - or even small - companies have become the backbone of economy: EU has almost lost all its bigs; its economy, if it is due to survive, will only survive thanks to medium or small sized companies. Marketing and management gurus should stop addressing impressively big companies only, the effiency of which is often very doubtaful: they should also make case studies of next door company, averaging fifty employees. Thank you