Enterprise Business

What’s Enterprise Business?

Imagine your five-person startup that makes a cool project management app suddenly grew into Microsoft. That’s basically what enterprise business is – it’s what happens when a business becomes so big it needs an HR department just to manage its other HR departments.

Definition

Enterprise business typically refers to large organizations that meet several key criteria:

• Annual revenue of $50-100+ million
• 250+ employees (often 500+ in some classifications)
• Complex organizational structure with multiple departments
• Formal business processes and governance
• Operations across multiple locations or regions
• Established IT infrastructure
• Structured decision-making processes

How It Works

Let’s compare an enterprise software company to a small IT startup to understand the key differences:

Decision Making

IT Startup: “Hey team, let’s add dark mode to our app!”
Decision made over ping pong table, implemented next day

Enterprise: “Let’s form a committee to evaluate the potential impact of dark mode on our cross-platform user experience paradigm.”
Six months and 47 meetings later, they’re still discussing the shade of dark

Structure

IT Startup:

• CEO (who also codes)
• Three developers (who also do customer support)
• One marketer (who’s actually the CEO’s cousin)

Enterprise:

• CEO (who mainly attends board meetings)
• 17 layers of management
• Departments with more people than your entire startup
• Teams dedicated to managing other teams

Technology

IT Startup:
“Our tech stack? Whatever our lead developer was into last week.”

Enterprise:
“Our technology ecosystem comprises a strategic integration of legacy systems from 1995 (that nobody dares to touch) with cutting-edge solutions (that take 8 months to get approved).”

Meetings

IT Startup:
“Stand-up meeting! Everyone look up from your laptops for 5 minutes.”

Enterprise:
“We need to schedule a pre-meeting to prepare for the planning meeting that will determine when to have the actual meeting.”

Security

IT Startup:
“Password is ‘password123’. Don’t tell anyone!”

Enterprise:
>Retinal scans
>Security badges
>Complex passwords that change every 2 hours
>A security team larger than most startups’ entire user base

Development Process

IT Startup:
“Push to production and pray. We can always roll back.”

Enterprise:
Planning phase (3 months)
Development phase (6 months)
Testing phase (4 months)
More testing (2 months)
Final approval (3 months)
Deploy tiny change to button color

Customer Support

IT Startup:
“Tweet us your problem, our CTO will fix it between coffee breaks.”

Enterprise:
“Please submit a ticket to our Level 1 Support Team, who will escalate it to Level 2, who might consider mentioning it to Level 3 next quarter.”

Why Go Enterprise?

Advantages

• Stable enough to survive an apocalypse
• Resources that make startup founders cry
• Actually has an IT budget (not just a shared credit card)
• Real benefits (beyond free energy drinks)

Challenges

• Moves slower than a sloth in meditation
• More processes than a chemistry textbook
• Needs documentation for the documentation
• Innovation requires permission from seven different departments

How to Know You’re Becoming Enterprise

You might be turning into an enterprise when:

• Your “quick team chat” requires booking a conference room
• You have more managers than developers
• You start using words like “synergy” unironically
• Your software needs approval from people who don’t know how to use it
• Your office map needs a “You Are Here” marker

Working with Enterprise

If you’re a startup selling to enterprise customers, prepare for:

• Sales cycles longer than most startup runways
• Security questionnaires that could be published as novels
• Integration requirements with systems older than your founders
• Meetings about meetings about potential future meetings

Conclusion

Enterprise business is like your scrappy IT startup after it grew up, got a proper job, and started wearing suits. It’s bigger, more stable, and way more complex – but sometimes misses the days when decisions could be made over pizza and energy drinks.

Remember: Every enterprise was once a startup that survived long enough to need an org chart.