You can't out-Amazon Amazon.
If you’re selling books, you can’t compete with Amazon on volume. You can’t compete on variety. You can’t compete on price and last for very long.
But you can compete on the experience you give your clients. You can compete on the connection you have with your people in your world. You can compete on agility. You can compete on flexibility. You can compete on adaptability.
Here’s something to think about. Imagine it’s one year from now. What would your world look like if you’d invested time, energy, thought, creativity, and imagination into improving all the things that you can compete on? What would have changed?
Magic Moments
"...good service means caring enough to have another's comfort and wellbeing at heart. This is truly something magical..."
Chris and Jeff Galvin | Cookbook de Luxe
What if you’d invested in crafting each detail of your client experience to make it richer, broader, deeper, and more varied than it is now?
How many magic moments have you created? Touchpoints that show how much care, consideration, refinement, and effort you've put in. Small details as well as the big stuff. Not that you had to but you did because it was important to you.
Invest a little time to think about that. Come up with some ideas. Borrow interesting concepts from other places and put your individuality on them. Adapt them to your own company.
Problems Solved Eliminated
What if you decided that you were going to do a post-mortem on every problem that comes up and design a way to make sure that it couldn’t happen again? Your clients have a better experience and you don't have to waste time fixing preventable problems that have already come up before.
Community
What if you'd set out to create long-lasting connections with every one of your clients, your team, your audience, and everyone else in your corner of the world?
What would that look like? What would that feel like? What would you be doing?
What can you do?
Imagine you’re telling us about all the things you’ve done to make this happen. Imagine the impact on what you do, how you do it, and who you do it for.
What would you have done to make that happen?
If we were having a coffee together a year from now and comparing a snapshot of where you and your company had got to with one that we’d taken one year before. What differences would we notice?
What would make people in your world sit up and take notice? What could you and your team do that would make you proud of what you've achieved?
When I’ve done this exercise with clients, many of them quickly come up with a long list. You might have one too (or at least some ideas jotted down somewhere on a faded post-it note from a management meeting nine months ago.)
Get Going
Do a quick 80/20 scan on your ideas, pick some places to start and put a project or two into your system. Choose projects you’ll enjoy. Choose projects you know will have a positive impact and you’ll be happy with when they’re completed. Then go back to your list and pick some more. As you go along you’ll come up with new things to add.
No need to compete anymore.
As you bring more and more of these ideas to life, the more you create an experience that's unique to your company. Something that no-one will find elsewhere. The further you travel down this road, the more you pull away from your competition.
You're crafting a unique experience that can't be found anywhere else. You'll discover that it isn't about competing anymore because no-one else can do what you can do the way that you do it.
Productivity isn’t only about having a way to manage all the stuff that comes hurtling at you every day. A good productivity system should encourage you to be pro-active. It should feel empowering.
It should give you the space and the capacity to work on projects like this. It should help you make the changes you want to see reality.