The economic rents associated with patent portfolios are highly skewed with only a small portion having value. This leads researchers and industry to ask what early strategic patenting decisions around the patent itself will impact the future value of the patent, specifically within the context of small firms. To address this question the paper modeled these ex-ante strategic patenting decisions by using a common measurement of forward citations as a proxy for patent value. The six indicators of family size, breadth, claim count, jurisdiction count, provisional basis and priority claim were modeled using a sample of 386 patents granted in the Mechanical and Electrical field. A focus on the small firm as well as the two strategic patent decision indicators provisional basis and priority claim are areas that have not been explicitly investigated in previous research. Controlling for industry and firm patenting experience resulted in differences of predictors between small and large firms, with a higher likelihood of strategic patenting decisions influencing small firms over large firms. A stronger relationship was found for small firms with indicators of breadth and priority claims, as compared to a weaker relationship of only claim counts for large firms. Research also indicated that from a small firm management perspective the most potential valuable patent is one that covers a broad scope of technology is a new filing and does not claim priority to other applications.