The Essential Steps to Business Success—Step Three

The Essential Steps to Business Success-Step Three

How do you compete with the guy across the street or in the next town over? What makes a customer seek you out as opposed to the competition? Most likely your business has a lot of competition in the same space. Standing out in the crowd can be difficult and you don’t want to be the low cost supplier just to get business. That is a fast road to the bottom. We must differentiate ourselves from the competition, we must stand out or we will be ignored. Hence the third step in The Essential Steps to Business Success.

Step 3: Differentiate Your Business

In Seth Godin’s book Purple Cow he describes driving through the French countryside with his family and how enchanted they were by the storybook-like cows grazing on picturesque pastures beside the highway. They drove for some time marveling at how beautiful everything was. But then in about twenty minutes, they started ignoring the cows. The new cows were just like the old cows, and what was once amazing was now common. In fact, they were worse than common—they were boring. But then he thought, a purple cow, now that would be interesting. The essence of the purple cow is that it would be remarkable and stand out in the herd. It would get their attention.

Due to the enormous volume of stimulus bombarding each of us every day, we have become skilled at filtering out whatever is common or boring. Our businesses are subject to the same phenomenon, and to be successful we can’t just be “better,” we must also be different:

• Do you know your unique value proposition? Or are you jumping on the bandwagon of fads (the road to failure)? If you think you should be like the guy down the street, you will never stand out in a crowd. You’ll just be one of the herd.
• What are your vision and values for the organization and do you have the right people engaged to help take your business to the next level? Often the primary difference between you and the competition is you and your management team. Your vision and values give your organization personality and character and can make the critical difference.
• Where is your focus? Is it on the customer? Is that true for your entire staff? When your staff is customer focused, continually anticipating and meeting customer needs, you are collectively creating a business that stands apart.
• How can you provide more value than anyone else in your industry? You can’t do it without understanding who you are, what business you are really in, and what your customers want. What dramatic and quantifiable value will you create for your customers? What is your competitive advantage?

How will you paint yourself purple to stand out from the herd? If you need help differentiating your business from the competition, call us. We can help you find your true color, making a dramatic improvement in your success and bottom line revenue.  garyfurr@garyfurrconsulting.com