Anecdotally, I’d say that most business owners think their companies stand out from their competition, but maybe only about a tenth have actually attempted to validate their beliefs.
A great deal of shoe leather and elbow grease can go a long way to creating a competitive advantage.
And I mean really validate — not just conduct some survey for marketing purposes to say “look how awesome people think we are!” — actually take time to discover their competitive advantage.
For example, in the defense industry, companies often believe that they have strong differentiators. This is obvious when you look at their websites, capability descriptions, and marketing materials.
Personally, I found it difficult to differentiate our physicists from theirs, our mathematicians from theirs, our engineers from theirs, and so on. Oh, sure, companies often have a niche where they stand head-and-shoulders above the rest, but those niches often can’t be leveraged enough to grow a company beyond a few million (there are exceptions). Moreover, in the high-tech world, those niches are often made obsolete by some new breakthrough — or replication by a larger competitor — which normalizes the competitive advantages across companies and drives commoditization.
Here’s the problem:
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