Career Change Strategy: Big Fish in a Small Pond

A smaller and less prestigious company with high growth potential can be an interesting target for a career change.

Imagine a girl raised with her two sisters by a single mother who had recently quit their alcoholic father. Being the oldest child, this girl, while still in high school, starts working as a shop assistant and a waitress to help her mom make ends meet. Now fast forward to today, about 20 years later, imagine this same girl as a very successful president and COO of a multi-billion dollar food & beverage group. Sounds like a Cinderella story, isn’t it? And yet this story is true and the girl is Kat Cole, president, and COO of Focus Brands.

Kat appeared in an episode of Adam Grant’s podcast WorkLife, dedicated to networking. Her story is a story of being a giver, seeing possibilities, and using every opportunity to grow and learn even from the most mundane tasks. In just 2 years on her first waitress job, she had just turned 19 but had already built a résumé of knowing how to run a restaurant and was considered a top employee. She was asked to be a part of the training team to go open the first-ever of her restaurant’s franchises in Sydney, Australia. What followed was fast track all the way.

Her story also happens to be an illustration of success when you join a small pond. And a slightly quirky one: the restaurant she started in at 17 was Hooters.

Kat Cole: There weren't Wharton MBAs beating down the doors to go work at Hooters. But they were growing exponentially, opening up new restaurants all over the place. And so they had to look within to find their talent. I was receiving a disproportionate number of development and growth opportunities in that company, because of the lack of influx of talent coming in from the outside. 

Adam Grant: … so instead of choosing the most prestigious organization, you might end up with a better network at the organization that does the most promotions from within or that's growing the fastest, where you can progress the quickest. 

When you consider a career change, especially a radical one, targeting smaller and less prestigious companies can improve your chances to hit the jackpot because of lesser competition.

However, this option does not come without trade-offs. In their book, “Your Career Game: How Game Theory Can Help You Achieve Your Professional Goals”, Nathan Bennet and Stephen Miles consider the pros and cons of choosing a small pond over a bigger one.

Is it better to be a big fish in a small pond or a small fish in a big pond? Not unpredictably, the answer is “it depends.” Each circumstance contains threat and opportunity, and wise players will consider all of the options.

Benefits of the Small Pond

The most compelling characteristic of the “small pond” is greater individual visibility. This cuts both ways, of course. Both success and failure will be much more easily attributed to individuals in small ponds: there is no place to hide. The upside of this is that individuals working in small work environments have better opportunities to create reputations and build their personal brands.

A close second in terms of the attractiveness of the small work environment is the opportunity to better understand the larger operation—this is the sort of understanding that can be leveraged over the course of a career. This breadth of exposure is, arguably, better preparation for higher-level positions than that obtained by someone buried deeper in the silo of a larger operation.

Benefits of the Big Pond

The greatest upside of the big pond is that it provides a great place to learn; time is largely spent “under the radar” because newcomers rarely are uniquely identified as owners of critical work. There are many examples of big ponds that provide world-class training and development opportunities that can be leveraged over the course of a career. (yet) the central trade-off that career game players need to wrestle with—how do you enjoy the benefits of the big pond while simultaneously making sure that you don’t become invisible?

To that, I would add that you have to consider the growth potential of the business you target to join for your career change: in a high-growth environment, you will have better chances not only to get a foot in the door but also further grow with the company.

Art: Yara Kono