How Small Startups Can Profit From Competitor's Woes With the right mix of speed, timing and guts, smart founders can profit hugely from their much, much, much larger rivals' misfortune.

Daniel Miller is at a disadvantage. As the co-founder of Empowered Staffing, a boutique recruitment firm in Evanston, Ill., he has to go head-to-head with giant rivals who have greater name recognition and a bigger media presence -- not to mention resources that his tiny team of seven will never be able to match. To keep his pipeline filled, he has to get creative. When Miller kept seeing the same jobs being posted by one big rival over and over again, he decided to find out why.

Related: 3 Tips For Researching Your Rivals

After some sleuthing, he discovered that his rival was having problems. It was assigning inexperienced recruiters, who, Miller says, weren't getting adequate training, to large client accounts. As a result, the candidate selection was consistently missing the mark, causing the job searches to drag on and on.