There can be a bit of an inferiority complex in SMEs.

I know because I had it.

I spent 20 years working in an SME, dealing regularly with customers, suppliers and stakeholders in much larger organisations. And somewhere along the way, I’d absorbed the idea that the people in the bigger companies probably knew more than we did.

They had bigger teams. More specialised roles. Bigger budgets. Fancier job titles.

Then I did an MBA.

And one of the biggest surprises had very little to do with what I learned.

It was discovering how much I already knew.

Sitting in groups with people from completely different industries and backgrounds, I began to realise that the experience I’d built up over 20 years was far more valuable and transferable than I’d appreciated.

In an SME, you rarely get to stay neatly in your lane.

Finance overlaps with operations. Operations overlaps with customers. Customers overlap with production. Production affects cash. A problem with a supplier can become a production problem, a customer problem and a cashflow problem before you’ve finished your morning coffee.

You learn to join the dots.

But because you do it every day, you don’t necessarily think of it as expertise.

I’ve seen the same thing repeatedly since I started consulting with SMEs.

Often, the knowledge is already in the business.

The owner knows which customers are actually profitable, even if nobody has properly analysed it. Someone on the floor knows exactly where time is being wasted. The person doing the admin knows which part of the process is ridiculous. Everyone knows that spreadsheet shouldn’t be running half the company.

The problem isn’t always a lack of knowledge.

Sometimes nobody has stepped back far enough to see what they already know, put some structure around it and decide what to do next.

That, incidentally, is one of the reasons I eventually developed The Momentum Map. Not to give business owners another complicated framework, but to give them somewhere to step out of the day-to-day and get what is already in their heads onto one page.

So perhaps there’s a useful question here for any SME owner:

What does your business know that you’ve stopped noticing?

What have you become very good at simply because you’ve had to?

And what could you do with that knowledge if you stopped treating it as “just what we do”?

I went into an MBA expecting to learn a lot.

I did.

I just hadn’t expected one of the biggest lessons to be discovering the value of what I already knew.