Show You’re Better Than Competitors In < 30 Seconds

When it comes to making a purchase, people are always comparing you to the alternative.

The fastest way to demonstrate that you are better than your nearest competitor is to create a feature table.

To do this, create a table and list out all of the things that make your offer unique that your competitors can’t replicate.

Visually, it helps the customer see your unique selling proposition in < 30 seconds.

This is a super simple way to articulate, “We are better than the alternative you are considering.”

The Ideas Guy

Ideas are great, but great companies are not full of ideas. Most only need one.

The problem with ideas is that companies can only work on a few at a time.

The exact number depends on the structure of your teams, resources, bureaucracy and so on.

But I don’t think that number ever exceeds 10.

And for most, it’s far fewer.

If we’re being honest, at Compound (our gym), the best we’ve ever managed is three.

At Gravy, it’s never been more than two at a time.

You’ll get a sense for what the number is at your company based on how many ideas can be done well at any given time.

When you exceed that natural limit, companies crash hard.

You end up with a trail of half-baked work, deadlines and budgets blown all over the place and a litany of priorities that no one is specifically responsible for.

If you look back on what moved the needle last year, it’ll only be a couple of things.

It’s only ever a couple of things.

And if you asked how you could have made those couple of things go even better, the answer is likely, not do all the other things.

Early in Jeff Bezos’s career at Amazon, someone pulled him aside one day and said, “Jeff, you’ve got enough ideas to kill this company; ideas are not your problem”. 

Bezos prided himself on being the ideas guy and was shocked to hear that his rate of ideas was damaging Amazon.

Reflecting on this moment in a keynote, Jeff said: “You have to release the work at the right rate that the organisation can accept”.

Companies have cadences.

One of those cadences is the rate at which it can absorb ideas, the rate at which they can be defused through the company, and the rate at which they can be done.

Being the ideas guy is easy; delivering the right ideas at the right time is the hard part.