The retail business is hard. To excel in some businesses, you only have to be really smart every now and then; success depends more on execution than innovation. However, the seasonality of most retail businesses requires that they be smart four times a year – plus, like every other type of business, retailers must also execute well. It can take a year for a traditional retailer to recover from a misstep in a product selection for a single season.

In a 2018 company meeting, Jeff Bezos famously warned that Amazon would one day fail and go bankrupt, telling employees that their job was to delay that day for as long as possible. It’s hard to imagine Amazon faltering, but when I was a kid the same would have been said of Montgomery Ward, K-Mart and Sears. When I got a TRS-80 Tandy computer, I assumed Radio Shack would be around forever. Toys R Us? How in the world does a toy store fail?

This is why I marvel at small retailers, especially those with demonstrated staying power. Often, their success comes from competing against a behemoth – but on their own terms. Small retailers that succeed usually differentiate themselves in some way that doesn’t require scale.

While I admire anyone who takes a chance and starts a business, I patronize the locally-owned businesses that provide me something neither Amazon nor the big box retailers can. I switched from a big box drugstore to the Phoenix Pharmacy on Gay Street because they deliver. I always buy my power tools from Frank at the Village Hardware because they will fix things when I inevitably break them.

My firm operates in a similar way. We don’t try to out-compete Merrill Lynch or Raymond James on scale. Instead, we focus on the things we can do better and differently than the financial behemoths – and that’s where we find our strength.

If being local is the only advantage that a small business has, it won’t survive long. You may be able to bring people in the door a few times by promoting “buy local,” but if you are selling the same bath towels as Walmart and Amazon – especially at a higher price – customers will eventually settle back into more convenient or less expensive shopping patterns.

In that same 2018 speech about the finite life span of large businesses, Bezos said that the key to postponing Amazon’s demise was obsessing over customers, not itself. This philosophy is crucial for small retailers as well. The key to competing with the giants isn’t trying to outdo them at their own game. Instead, it’s about finding ways to serve customers more personally, more thoughtfully, and more effectively than anyone else.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.