We all want to work with the best clients that we possibly can. It’s easy in business to peek over the garden fence and look at who your competitors are working with. If they’ve made deals with some big names in your industry and you haven’t, it can feel a little deflating and a number of questions will probably come up. What have they done differently? How did they gain access to this client? Where am I going wrong?

In order to work with larger organizations, small businesses and startups need to offer something unique that the bigger company perhaps doesn’t have the expertise, personnel or time to do themselves. Large organisations can be very traditional in terms of their planning and decision making. Add in the many layers of bureaucracy that need to be navigated in a big corporation and the result is that many processes take a long time to be completed. Startups and small businesses on the other hand are very agile, they can complete projects or change directions much more quickly. This difference in timescales can pose a challenge when dealing with larger organisations but it also creates an opportunity for small businesses.

With us on this episode of the number one small business podcast is Jannick Malling. Jannick is the CEO and founder of Tradable, a comprehensive all-in-one platform that integrates trading tools and functionality, taking the hassle out of trading. Jannick has spent a lot of time dealing with both large financial organizations and much smaller tech startups to get Tradable to where it is today. He’s going to be sharing his expertise and tips on how to gain access to those big clients and how to work alongside them.

Issue Challenged in this Small Business Podcast:

How can I gain access and contracts to work with the world’s largest organizations?

About Jannick:

Jannick Malling was born and raised in Copenhagen, Denmark. He first started working in banking at 18 and over the course of his short career he has sought to bring the worlds of finance and tech closer together. In 2012 Jannick founded Tradable, an innovative trading platform that integrates all of the best trading tools in one convenient platform. Tradable allows users to handle sophisticated trades without the hassle. Jannick and his team work closely with software developers, banks and brokerage houses around the world.

Actionable Tips:

* Do something new. You can’t get the attention of large organizations by offering something that they think they can handle internally. You need to position your product in such a way that they will never have even considered doing themselves.

* Introduce unique features. You need to offer features and services that large organizations are not in a position to do themselves.

* Move fast and deliver quickly. Startups are more nimble than larger organizations so play to your strengths.

Top Quotes:

* “One of the issues is a time gap. For a startup, twelve months is a lifetime, for a large company, it’s only four quarterly reports.”

* “Steve Jobs didn’t see himself stealing customers from Microsoft, but he saw himself increasing the size of the market. It’s not always a zero sum game.”

* “It’s great to have confidence, especially if they can argue why they are so confident, but there’s also such a thing as being overly confident.”

* “Defining your initial market is one of the most difficult things to do. There’s no silver bullet, it’s just a lot of trial and error.”

* “You need to be very good at focusing on things, coordinating things and getting them delivered. As a startup working on your own product, you can use trial and error twenty times over and make adjustments. You have a nimbleness, but you don’t necessarily have that when you enter into a large partnership.”