>I am trying to come up with a good response to the "You're too small.>" Are you going to be around?" objection.

Surviving the recession is a badge of honour, survive bad times and you are likely to survive good. Point out that you survived the rough years.

Large corporations are people who happen to work for large corporations. Just a guy doing a job everyday.

On the other small aspects:

· If people work with you, they get you. In a larger business they can get anyone. A junior, a trainee, a student.

· If the client needs anything and gets in touch. They get you.

· There are no levels of management and distortion as messages are passed on, what the client says, the person doing the job hears directly.

· There is no opportunity for interdepartmental bickering wasting time.

· A project which takes a large business months can be done tomorrow as all the different inputs and sign off stages are none existent.

· If you have an idea which may be controversial so suppressed in a large company, there's no internal politics, you can bounce it off the client.
The client does not like to feel they are being "left out of the loop" or deprived of ideas.

· Because of the lack of infrastructure, you can just call up and talk to the client and quiz and get the information from the horse's mouth. The client finds this valuable. In a large company, "bothering" the client is a big issue.

· You are responsible to you. If you want to straight talk a client, you don't have to worry about the welfare of 100's. The client gets straight talk.

· There is no salesman razz.

· The money the client pays you does not support lots of staff and expertise and infrastructure they don't need. It goes into the client's project and to motivate the people working on the client's project.

The client is human, they need the reassurance that they are not going to get fired as you have not done your job, the "nobody got fired for specifying IBM" problem.

On the other hand the client is human, and it is nice to support someone friendly you can talk to who is fun to work with.