Build What Others Need!
So you want to get more money for your company? You want to retire to some tropical island and thumb your nose at the “Man”…Then build “WHAT OTHERS NEED!”
This idea goes to the heart of unlocking the most value for your business and it does not matter if your business is a start up or going into its 20th year. Identifying how your business can be dramatically different than your competitors will help you increase your current business and the value you can sell your business for in the future. Seth Godin, author of Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable, “… unless you are dramatically different, your product or service will never be noticed.” So what do you do?
- Identify the players in your market to understand what your competitors are doing and how you can attack the gaps in their offering.
- Answer questions about your competitors and yourself like, where do they compete, who do they serve, what do they offer, – study your competition hard. Try to understand them inside and out so you can …
- Answer the BIG questions – “How is my company DRAMATCIALLY DIFFERENT from XYZ company?”
- Once you identify how your company can be different focus your efforts on becoming different.
(I know this is abbreviated list but I could write and many have written entire books on this subject – Seth Godin has written several books on being dramatically different)
I was hired to position Rentalhouses.com for sale and within eight months we sold the company and received several “Extra Xs” for the company because we became dramatically different than our competitors and by becoming different we became the missing piece in the competitive puzzle. Our largest competitor was very similar to us and was the industry leader. After studying them and the next four competitors as relative to size we formulated a belief that we should compete where they were not. So we set off to build our listings business in geographies where our competition was weak believing that we could build a case for the market leader to buy our company to help them fill in their missing geographies (and even more important we became a weapon that would let the market leader’s chief competitor strike at the market leader where they were weakest – different story for a future blog post.) Ultimately this geographic strategy paid off as the market leader and ultimate buyer of RentalHouses.com liked that most of our customers did not overlap and allowed them to become truly dominant in areas where their own business was weak.
Geography is only one way to be different – try going for different types of customers, time of day, product adjacencies, – they do frozen you do fresh, they sell gas, you sell oil, they are appoint only you take street traffic, they do dry cleaning you do alterations, etc. – Just be DIFFERENT. – Fill in the GAPS.