Whichever business management skills go toward making a big company successful, those same skills will be equally viable for running a small business.

There are 12 key business management skills that will work for companies big and small.

So what are they? The points form an acronym: IT BECAME FAST.
1. Improve basic efficiency - constantly.
2. Think as simply and directly as possible about your actions and why you're taking them.
3. Behave towards others as you would like them to behave towards you.
4. Evaluate each business and business opportunity as objectively and logically as you can.
5. Concentrate on what you are good at doing.
6. Ask questions all the time about your performance, your markets, your objectives.
7. Make money: because if you don't, you won't get the opportunity to do anything else.
8. Economise, because doing the most with the least is a valuable business management skill.
9. Flatten the company, so authority is shared by many people.
10. Admit to your failings and weaknesses, because only then will you be able to improve.
11. Share the benefits of success widely among those who have been instrumental in achieving it.
12. Tighten up the organisation in any area you can because success can lead to slackness.

Small businesses are prone to bureaucracy, stultifying procedures and internal politics just as much as big companies. However, the lesser size of the business makes the failings much less complicated to identify and to cure. But no business, whatever the sizes, is ever fault-free. But honing your business management skills along the lines of IT BECAME FAST will see your company moving in the right direction.

However, if your business does begin to make it big, you have to combine solidity with the flexible, fast virtues of a small business.

Even giant companies try to think small; splitting up the business into smaller units, each under the command of a single manager with the authority (in theory) of the owner.

The principle that these giants are working under should come naturally to small businesses, and applies equally: related activities should be grouped together under the clear direction of managers who work hand-in-hand with other members of a focused team. Many small businesses fall far short on this principle, but it is nevertheless relevant.

As with the business management skills necessary for IT BECAME FAST (along with other factors, such as serving the right market), the closer you get to the ideal, the higher profits and growth will become.