Earlier this week I spoke to Silicon Valley Strategist, author, and Forbes contributor Sramana Mitra about the tenets of her Stimulus Plan for Entrepreneurs, which she has outlined on Forbes and which I was seeking greater detail on for our March IDEAS newsletter, which comes out next week.

One of the questions I asked Sramana that will not appear in our interview with her, due to length, is her assessment of workplace team building, employee engagement, or other measures small firms in any industry can implement to take on their larger peers.  She responded with the following:

I do a lot of work in the domain of small firms taking on large companies.  My general strategy for these firms is to look for the gaps in these larger companies' defenses and go after those instead of going front and center in competition.  This is a strategy that a lot of firms can follow.

From the people point of view I think that frugality is a virtue.  Resources such as time, energy and money are incredibly finite and scarce, so conserving these resources is important.  Energy in particular is an important thing because small firms are made up of only a handful of people, and their energy is what is building companies, and that energy is not finite either.  So that energy needs to be focused on the right priorities and not left to dissipate.

This is where strategy comes in.  You want to pick your top one, three or five battles to go after and really throw the company's weight behind them and be very disciplined as opposed to taking on a hundred different things.

To read our interview with Sramana when it comes out next week, click here to subscribe to IDEAS (it's free).  And stay tuned here for a follow-up post soon on another question I asked her that was also left on the cutting room floor of our forthcoming interview with her.

Bonus: A month ago I wrote about Sramana's free, online strategy roundtables for entrepreneurs.  Her next session is on Wednesday this week at 9 am PT.  Click here for more info and to register.