It’s worthwhile knocking on a few doors of other small blocks and asking them for referrals, or if you are in one of those facebook groups called “<Suburb Name> Living” or similar, ask on there.
I’m in a small block and we’ve been very happy with our strata manager, but recently they merged into a larger outfit and we’re starting to see signs of “corporate” strata, such as different departments within the strata company that don’t communicate well with each other (the compliance department, the contracts department etc). We have a strata manager who is supposed to be our single-point-of-contact, but quite often she can’t answer questions and outsources them to people in these other departments who we’ve never met and who don’t know if they are dealing with a small block or a mega-complex. We’re definitely experiencing an erosion in the personal level of service. Not ready to move yet, especially given how many awful stories are posted on these pages, but we’re not the happy customers that we once were.