Word to the wise: If you don’t stand out in some way, you’re done.
You might be able to exist, you might manage to survive, but that’s all you’ll ever have to look forward to. You can be a one-man show and still be corporate. Don’t do it. Don’t waste your time being just like everyone else. Don’t waste your soul on being average.
Give yourself more credit. Everyone has strengths. Everyone has talents and abilities. Not using them every day even in some small way is such a shame it ought to be a crime. (And it’s bad business to boot.)
Whether you’re a photography studio, a web design firm, a sports magazine, a sportswear company, a triathlon shop or an antique furniture store, you either stand out, or someone who does will come along to wow your audience and steal your business right from under your nose.
Trust me on this: you can’t afford to be average. Even if you’ve based your entire business model on the lowest pricepoints, on bare-bones bottom-line imports, you have to take your uniqueness as far as humanly possible… and then some.
Yes, even accounting and financial services firms can stand out. Restaurants. Retail outlets. Breweries. Day care centers. Schools. Law offices. Graphic design firms. Janitorial services agencies. Manufacturing plants. It doesn’t matter. Your industry and specialty are irrelevant. Anyone can stand out.
Here’s a tip for you: The best way to stand out in a crowd is simply to stand for something: Producing the most useful online content for your users. Making it easy for your customers to get information on products before they shop. Providing your clients with the best after-sale service in the industry. Brewing the best cup of coffee in the world. Turning boring shopping experiences into something fun and enjoyable. Returning calls faster than anyone else. Being the easiest company your customers have ever had the pleasure to do business with.
Business models are just templates, folks. They’re the framework. Marketing, advertising, branding, PR, all of these things are great, but remember that you can customize your business all on your own too. From packaging to billing to the way you answer the phones. From the grade of toilet paper you stock in your bathrooms to the way you hire new talent. From the corners you will never, ever cut to the crazy ideas you decide to put stock into. From the stand you take on community issues to the tone of the dialogue you foster with your customers. It is all in your hands.
Stand for something. Stand out. Be extraordinary, if only for a year, if only in the eyes of a handful of customers. If only during the course of a single phonecall.
Be memorable.
Be worthy of note.
Don’t ever, ever, ever settle for safe or average or just good enough. Not in the big things. Not in the small things.
Know who you are and who you want to be as a person, as a company, as a brand, and just do it.
No one – let me repeat this – no one is standing in your way.
Now go out there and conquer something. (Yes, right now.)
This is a great post Olivier. It really speaks to the importance of Unique Value. It is amazing to me how few small businesses or businesses of any size for that matter understand the true meaning of this concept. Simply put, Unique Value is all about answering the following two questions;
1) What makes you different?
2) Why should anybody care?
That may seem a bit harsh but, the reality is, speaking purely from the small business stand point, small businesses cannot afford to compete head-to-head with their larger competitors, period. They will be out-gunned and out-spent at every turn.
Additionally, as a small business, they don’t have the scale necessary to compete in a comodity market, which incidentally is all about (low) price. They need to work smarter not harder. They need to out-flank their larger competitors.
That brings me to my third point — Profit. It has been demonstrated again and again, that the more clearly and distinctly a small business defines their Unique Value, the more profitable they will be. The more specialized they are, the fewer competitors they have, even if they are differentiating themselves in a perceptual way. The more specialized they are the more they can effectively charge for their products or services, i.e., the higher their profit margin.
This is the law of supply and demand plain and simple. If you have a limited supply (your specialty product or service), then you can pretty much determine for yourself what the market will bare based on the demand.
Excellent post. I will RT this on Twitter!
Wow. Thanks for the great comment, Chaz. It’s worthy of its own post!
I’m hearing “Eye of the Tiger” in the background now & am totally pumped! Thanks for the fantastic post! I’m going to go tweet about it.
[...] Stand Out! – Invest in your strengths to generate more business and keep your customers happy. [...]