In this episode, we talk through why being unique can be such a drain on a small business.

Small businesses should be unique when it comes to their core offering and they way they address the marketplace, but when it comes to the non-core activities, they should be conforming to best practices and seeking out solutions other businesses have employed with success.

Forums like startups.com and American Express Open are great places to look, and a little birdy told me there might be another solution in the works…keep your ear to the ground!

Transcription:
Hi! I’m Adam Neary, and this is Confessions of the Startup CEO. This is episode 5: “You are not unique.” Now it goes against conventional wisdom to tell a small business owner that they are not unique, but I am going to do it anyway because it is good news. It is fight club time! You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake, and it is a good thing. Right? Because there are a lot of vendors and consultants out there that want to tell you that the challenges that you are facing are unique. They are different from the challenges that your competitors face. Your unique culture and the way you approach the market place is so different from what everyone else is doing that you need a custom solution. You need to craft something from scratch. We need to sit down and get a blank white board and start from scratch and try to figure out how to solve all your business problems and I think that’s nonsense.

You know, 10 years in the management consulting industry working with large organizations, what I have discovered is THEY are not unique. These large multinational organizations are all solving all of the same problems on a day by day basis, and when it comes to operations there is stuff that Toyota and Proctor and Gamble have been doing for 25 years that these organizations haven’t been doing. And if you walk in there and say, “We are going to start from scratch we are going to figure this out because you are so unique.” Then those customers and those clients are missing out on opportunities just to take what is working to do it.

So you know your business. You and your team know your business better than I would. So I want to say so that we are clear. This is not supposed to be an arrogant post. You should know what is unique about the way you engage in the market place. You should know what is unique about what you are offering your customers and THAT’S an opportunity to be unique. That is an opportunity to be different. When it comes to everything else, the non-core stuff, what you spend on office supplies. Many of you think about a million different things that are not core to your business…that is not an opportunity to be unique. Don’t be unique with accounting or legal, don’t be…

So we have decided that you are not unique and have a conversation. So what is the next step? I think you treat a non-core business problem like a technical error that comes up on your computer. You have some kind of error code and your noise goes off and you take it to Google and you see what the Google has to say. You figure somebody else has already solved this problem. I want to take some non-core business problem that you have got something that has been nagging you and you have been thinking all along that I think maybe I know people have solved this problem and there got to be an answer out there like you. Use this post as an excuse to believe that it is true and just go Google it. Go to American Express Open. Go to startups.com where they are asking a lot of questions. Very soon we are going to have a forum where you can go too and hopefully that helps answer some of these problems. Take this confidence, take this encouragement and go solve the business problem that is not core to your business and see how it goes. I love…people have started to comment more and more on the blog and is picking it up on iTunes now. If you solve some of these problems throw us some comments and let us know how it is going on out there and we would love to have a dialog and hopefully this has been helpful.

Thanks!