Smaller = Smarter (When You Pick Right)

Big IT vendors are like cruise ships: impressive, expensive, and painfully slow to turn. When the weather changes — or your supply chain catches fire — you’ll be lucky if the captain even notices before you’ve hit the iceberg.

That’s the hidden tax of “scale.” It looks safe on the brochure. There are glossy logos, endless certifications, and the comforting illusion that a 500-person vendor must know what they’re doing. But size doesn’t guarantee intelligence. It guarantees inertia.

As one LinkedIn commenter put it perfectly:

“ERP failures? They start on Day 1. Not during implementation. Not during go-live. But at the very first meeting.”

That first meeting is where the “safe choice” usually begins to sink. The vendor arrives with a pre-baked playbook — your logo pasted neatly into their slides — and assumes you’ll adapt to their process. They’ve already decided which modules, frameworks, and workflows you’ll use before they’ve heard a word about how your operation actually runs.

If you push back, they nod sympathetically, promise to “take it into consideration,” and then carry on exactly as planned. The project roadmap stays the same. The bill grows. Your trust quietly evaporates.

The difference between building for and building with

One of our Kaunas High Tech Cluster teams took over a rollout like this for a logistics company. The incumbent vendor — a global name with a polished enterprise portfolio — had spent six months coding without ever setting foot on the warehouse floor. Not once.

So the Kaunas team did the obvious thing: they showed up in safety vests. They walked the aisles, scanned barcodes, and traced the real movement of goods from inbound to dispatch. They mapped bottlenecks that the “process flow diagram” had somehow missed.

Four months later, the new system went live — without downtime, overtime, or the usual post-launch chaos. The warehouse manager still calls them “the people who listened.”

That’s not magic. It’s what happens when you work with engineers who think before they build. Who’d rather understand your business model than show off their framework?

Small doesn’t always mean better — but the right small does

Let’s be honest: “small” can also mean risky. There are boutique firms that bite off more than they can chew. Freelancers who ghost at the first sign of trouble. “Agile” teams that confuse flexibility with improvisation.

But the right small partner — senior, focused, and personally invested in your success — operates differently. They can do in months what a lumbering giant won’t finish this fiscal year. Why? Because they don’t waste time navigating approval hierarchies or playing corporate telephone.

Their meetings are shorter. Their feedback loops are tighter. And when something breaks, you don’t get a ticket number — you get a phone call.

Three questions to ask before hiring “small”

1. Will they walk your floor (literal or metaphorical) before writing code?
   If they’re not willing to understand how your business actually runs, they’ll design the wrong system faster than any big vendor could.
2. Can they explain your workflow back to you — accurately and in plain language?
   If they can’t repeat it, they haven’t really understood it.
3. Do they have the authority to change the plan mid-flight without 15 layers of approval?
   True agility isn’t about fancy methods. It’s about decision rights.

At Kaunas High Tech Cluster, we’ve seen enough “enterprise-scale” disasters to know this much: speed, alignment, and craftsmanship don’t come from headcount. They come from care, context, and competence.

So before you choose your next IT partner, remember: the biggest ship doesn’t always reach port first. Sometimes, the smart move is to sail with the crew that actually knows the waters.

Stop relying on big names. Start solving real problems.