The 4 Ways to Beat 99% Of Other Businesses | Ep 879
31:45 Share

I think you can beat 99% of people not by beating them in every possible facet, but just picking one thing to beat them on. And that's how you can win in competition. Now, if you can do more than one, you dominate.

What's going on guys? This will be either the absolute best video you'll ever see, the worst video you'll ever see, or somewhere in between. So, what is it? You can beat 99% of other businesses if you only pick one thing to beat them on. Now, if you can beat them in two vectors, you become a possible. But there's four that you can compete on. Alright, so that's what we're going to talk about. Now, the first of the four vectors is speed.

right? How do I do what I'm going to do faster than everybody else? Now, what's interesting about this is that I have been doing business for a minute now. And I would say that of the four vectors, I'm starting with speed because I actually think it's the most important of the four. And I think the reason for that is that humans learn behaviors with decreased latency. Meaning if like Facebook and Instagram or whatever you're watching this on has trained us

to come back, not because they pay us to come back, because they have compressed latency for some positive outcome. And the positive outcome they give us is a thumbs up. They literally give us a little red light. And other people give actual money, but at a delay, and they struggle to get people to do things. So think about it like this.

You pay someone who works for you every two weeks. It's much harder to motivate them than if you actually paid them in real time. And paying someone in real time is actually so effective, it's illegal.

And so truckers, for example, used to be able to get paid per mile and like almost essentially in real time. And so they actually outlawed it because guys would just keep driving to the point of like insanity and wouldn't sleep for days. And it was unsafe. All right. That's how powerful speed is because that is what trains behavior.

And so functionally, the questions that we have to ask ourselves is, okay, if speed is going to be my competitive advantage, it doesn't matter what we do, right? If you're in lawn care, there's components to speed, right? So on one angle, like you have to think about each of these larger vectors and smaller subvectors. So for speed, it could be the distance between when someone purchases and when they get something.

right? That's one vector of speed. The other vector is that if you're doing something on a recurring basis, how much time is it going to take each time? So for example, if I had a 10 minute workout, it's going to be more valuable than an hour long workout. If I could get the same results, right? If I, if I say I'm going to help someone get leads and I can help them get those leads in an hour versus waiting a week to turn on the ads, that's more valuable, right? And so at all times, it's always like,

How can we take what we're currently doing and do it faster? And I can promise you, if you just did that one thing compared to everyone else in your marketplace, you just delivered faster, you will have a sustainable competitive advantage over them and be able to charge premium prices for it. And what's really interesting about speed is that speed rarely actually costs more. It typically is...

it typically comes from idea alpha, meaning like idea over performance. Like you've thought through the process of their steps better than the competition has, and as a result, you actually can get better outcomes. Now, part of this also comes down to what types of customers you're picking. If you have a hundred different types of customers,

It's very difficult to do things quickly because you're doing lots of different things for lots of different people. This is why niching down also helps you provide more value because you're being more selective about the customers you're picking. And then as a result, you can be more templatized in the types of services and products that you ultimately offer. And so there's kind of three different vectors that I think about in terms of like, what can I actually do to improve speed? Because you're like, okay, I get that, but how do I actually do it?

it. All right. So number one is I want templates. All right. How can I take what we're currently doing and make these into templates? Can I have ad templates? Can I have email templates? Can I have landing page templates? Can I have, can I have presentation templates? Can I have, uh, like at least, at least templated steps that someone's going to follow, right? All of these are just templates that we can pass on to somebody else, create a repeatable process. If it's repeatable, they don't have to decide. Decision-making is typically the slowest part of the organization. So how to remove all decisions to speed up the time of completion. The second one

is pre-made. So if you're in physical products or even food, it's, I mean, fundamentally McDonald's changed the game in fast food because they started pre-making food. They already had burgers on the line. So when someone ordered a burger that he's handed it to him, if you haven't seen the movie founder, great movie, uh, he experiences and he's like, no, no, no, I just ordered. They're like, yeah, that's your burger. And he's like, no, I just ordered. And they're like, yeah, that's your burger. And he's like,

And it's this big aha moment like, oh, this changes everything. And so sometimes if you know, there was a great Persian place I used to go to. It crushes in California. It's called Panini Cafe. Go check it out. But they make amazing Persian food. But one of the things I realized is right as the lunch hour started, because I lived pretty close by back then, they just started grilling chicken because they knew that they were about to get the lunch rush. And they knew that they were going to have people who wanted jujube kebab. Shout out for those who know. All right. And so they just...

thought ahead of time and it became really bad because I would show up and be like, jujube kebab, extra rice, my whole thing. And they would just, boom, they would deliver for me because they didn't even have to make two order because they just knew certain amount of things are always going to have to man. And even if for some reason, someday they're not going to hit that, the benefit they get of the vast majority of their customers immediately getting served and how many tables they return faster, more than paid for the small extra chicken that maybe they didn't, they had to throw out at the end of the day. The third element here, and this

happens a lot with services is availability. Now, what does this mean? I'll give you a couple examples. So if you have a spa or a salon or something,

If you have more availability for people to book, it means they want something and they can immediately get it faster. They can get the appointment with you to get their nails done, get their hair done, get their back cracked, get their paint away, whatever it is. Basically, the sooner you can have that availability, the more you will be able to convert and the more people will be willing to pay. And so if someone says, hey, I have an appointment in four days or I have an appointment in one day, they're probably far more likely to come to you and be willing to pay more for that one appointment.

And so what, but how do you increase availability? Sometimes it means you have to pay people more or extend their hours or hire more people. But the reality is that this is one of those things that is one of the largest vectors in terms of increasing throughput on a business that is underappreciated by the vast majority of business owners. And so when I invest in a company or I look at a company, a lot of times I'm like, Ooh,

Like it's one of those huge hidden diamonds. I probably shouldn't even share this, but it's one of those hidden diamonds that I could almost always drive 20, 30, 40% more through business by simply better staffing the hours.

And so like even at acquisition.com, we currently sell 12 hours a day, seven days a week. And we're now investing so we can get to 20 hours a day because we have such a larger international market, right? So it's like we always want to increase our availability because I know the math behind this and it's a huge impact on the bottom line, all right? So the first vector, macro vector that you can win on, and you only need one, but if you have more than one, you just dominate everyone, all right? Is that we went over speed.

Now, the second is risk. All right. So how can we make our thing not risky? Now, think about McDonald's, the example I gave earlier. Well, they're both fast and they're not risky. So what does that actually mean? Now, part of you are like, oh, no, they're risky because of cancer and all this stuff. Well, let's ignore that. Because why? Why do people not care about this stuff? Actually, it's funny. Speed.

It's not latency. If you ate a burger and immediately had something growing on you, no one would eat the burgers. But because it happens 40 years from now, no one cares. Speed changes behavior and lack of speed doesn't. So what about risk? So a way you can translate risk is reliability and consistency. It's a different way of saying it.

Which is when people, but this is especially important for services that are recurring, where people get month after month after month after month, they keep coming back again and again and again. And so the question is, how can we consistently match conditions between the perfect and ideal state and every state that happens afterwards? And most people dramatically underestimate the amount of variables that exist in any given encounter. And so as a result, they have far less consistency than they otherwise should.

All right. So that's just the output. Now, what are the other components of this? So I'll say one is consistency, right? In terms of

in terms of decreasing risk. We can also consider that reliability. If you say you're going to cut someone's grass, but sometimes you're late or you show up a different day or you don't show up one week, like that's a major hit. People just don't want to deal with that stuff. Like they're not willing to. On the flip side, if you're the type of guy where someone's like, you know what? I could undercut your lawn care guy. You know what? I could clean instead of your cleaning person. A lot of people are like, you know what? I've been with Rose for 10 years and she's never missed a day. You're like, I just...

I'm not willing to take the risk because she's already paid down so much. So, but I could do it for 20% less. It's like, it's just not worth it. Right? That's real value that actually defends the business. Now, what other types of risk mitigation can we offer? All right. One of them is reputation, right? So this is where brand comes in. So you can,

The consistency of reliability typically happens after someone makes a purchase. But how do we shift the perception of the customer that they're going to have a high likelihood outcome that they're going to get what they want? Well, one of the easiest ways is that you've gotten somebody else exactly what they wanted and that person found out about it. Now, if they don't know someone directly, but then they just heard lots of whispers, that's a reputation. You've done it enough time for enough people that you just have a reputation for keeping your word.

Right. And a lot of people, especially in the in the small business space, especially, especially in their response base, all of a sudden, sometimes their their their costume car customer goes up rapidly and they're like, what's going on? What's happening? The thing is, is that the CPMs in your industry haven't gone up by double or triple in that same period of time. So what is it? Is that your word of mouth? People believe in positive word of mouth. You think negative word of mouth doesn't exist? Negative word of mouth is like 10 times as viral as positive.

And somehow you think that doesn't affect your sales. Of course it affects your sales. People would have otherwise purchased choose not to because of something they heard or read online. Right? And so one is okay. So we've got reputation. We've got, and we've got consistency. So how do we do this? How do we actually operationalize this? Now,

I've talked a lot about guarantees. I talked about it in the offers book. And a lot of people took that immediately like, oh, guarantees are the only way that we reverse risk. It's just one of the components. And I give that to people because I assume that a lot of people don't have a good reputation or don't have a reputation at all, or they don't have enough customers to really develop a process to become consistent. But these two things are how you deliver long-term risk mitigation. In the short term, you're

You do guarantees. Now, again, and what's really interesting about this is that everyone assumes that I was like the guarantee guy, but like a lot of my stuff that I sell has no guarantees, right? But the thing is, is that there's four different types that I cover in the book, all right? The first is unconditional guarantees. When you're starting out, that's a great way to do it. Conditional guarantees. If you do this,

And it doesn't happen, then I'll do why. What's my consideration? What am I going to put on the table if you're going to put this money on the table? And a lot of times people mess this up. Guarantees only work if you have stakes. So if you don't have reputation, you've got to basically... It's literally like giving a payday loan. It's like you've got to take your watch off and be like...

If you give me the money, I'll put the watch down, right? You can take my car if I don't pay this loan back. It's the same idea just in business. You're starting out. You're like, here's my shirt. If I don't deliver these leads or I don't deliver a great back massage or I don't deliver a good fitness experience, you can take my shirt, right? But

Over time, there's the first two. There's two other types of guarantees. There's implied and then there's anti. All right. So implied guarantees is one of my favorite types to use, which is just performance based. If you're good at what you do, winners always want to compete on performance. Think about your best salespeople. They always want the most upside because they're good. And so if you're actually good, be willing to put it's another way of putting skin in the game for you. Right.

Right? And so just put skin in the game. And people are far more willing to take risk if you take some risk for them. So it's like, we've got this big pile of risk. How much are we going to eat down versus the customer eating down? Real quick, guys, I have a special, special gift for you for being loyal listeners of the podcast.

Layla and I spent probably an entire quarter putting together our scaling roadmap. It's breaking scaling into 10 stages and across all eight functions of the business. So you've got marketing, you've got sales, you've got product, you've got customer success, you've got IT, you've got recruiting, you've got HR, you've got finance. And we show the problems that emerge at every level of scale

and how to graduate to the next level. It's all free and you can get it personalized to you. So it's about 30-ish pages for each of the stages. Once you answer the questions, it will tell you exactly where you're at and what you need to do to grow. It's about 14 hours of stuff, but it's narrowed down so that you only have to watch the part that's relevant to you, which will probably be about 90 minutes. And so if that's at all interesting, you can go to acquisition.com forward slash roadmap, R-O-A-D, roadmap, roadmap.

Right. Now, here's the cool part is that you can shrink that pile of risk over time with reputation, which brings up the fourth guarantee, which is an anti-guarantee, which once you do have reputation and you are consistent, you don't see McDonald's saying we guarantee that the burger is going to be good. You just know it's going to be good.

Right? Because you've had enough people. Now, people are like, oh my God, McDonald's is not good. Calm down. You get the point from a business perspective. All right? So that's vector one is speed, is how can we do whatever we're doing faster? Number two is risk. How can we do it more consistently? How can we do it more reliably? How can we, and in so doing, build our reputation over time? And that consistency and reliability, how do I do that tactically? It's actually looking at as many variables that affect the condition or can affect the outcome for the customer as humanly possible.

and then actually trying to control for all of them. So BF Skinner, famous behavioral psychologist said, if many variables exist, many variables must be studied. And so you might find out. So like for us to make videos, we have like a hundred different little golden BBs, little things that when put together, make a good video. And if we just do 98,

it's just a little bit less good of a video. If we do 97, it's a little bit less good of a video. And so we just try it. Every time we learn a little bit more, we add to that list. Another condition that we didn't realize existed that mattered, we were just talking about one right before I did this video. So we did this big filming session

where I did a walk and talk and it was hot outside. So I took my shirt off and I was doing it. It was in Florida. It was super humid. And that whole series of kind of like walk and talk things that I did murdered. It was like some of my, it was probably the single best recording session I've ever had in terms of performance of the clips in the sessions.

So we were like, oh, walk and talks work great. So then I did another series of walk and talks where I'm just like in normal clothes because it wasn't, it was actually cold out. I think I put a jacket on. And so I put a jacket on in the second one. And literally, I think it might've been the actual worst recording session that I ever had. And so-

What we got to see there is that it wasn't the walk and talk that was the thing that made the shorts valuable. It might have been me being shirtless, which I have other considerations for, which was like, maybe I'll start Only Alex someday. But for now, those are the first two, speed and risk, or risque, if you will. Now, the third one is price. It's cheap, right? So you can be faster.

You can be less risky or you can be cheaper. Now, we have a fourth one too, but let's talk about this for a second. I'm always the, I tend to be the sell for more expensive guy. But you can win with any of these three vectors. If people absolutely know that your stuff's amazing, they'll be willing to pay more for it and they'll come to you instead of somebody else.

If you're the fastest, they absolutely will come to you over other people because you can deliver all these vectors of speed. If you're the cheapest, people will absolutely come to you. Like to pretend that price doesn't matter is silly. Of course, price matters. But so does value because value is a, sorry, the deal rather is the comparison between price, what you pay and what you get.

Right? And so something is appropriately cheap if you get tremendous value for a low price. But the answer is not hearing this and saying, oh, I will now lower my price. That is certainly a terrible decision. But instead, it's

Day one, deciding our competitive advantage, the mode that we're going to build around is being cheaper than everyone else. And you have to start that way day one. That means every component of the business from click to close to delivered is organized such that you can pass on as much of that cost saving to the customer. And so, for example, if you were like, hey, I want to start a marketing agency for small business owners. Well,

in general, typically a pretty bad business. Why? Because it churns out really high. They're volatility reflects onto you. With an exception, if you can make the services cheap enough, I have seen it work well. But I mean way cheaper than you think. I'm talking $100 to $300 a month for services that most people charge $2,000 a month for. When you can do that, now you have something that a lot of people are interested in. So that even on their worst day of business, they're like, well, I'm not going to cancel that. Like it's,

It's only a hundred bucks, only 200 bucks. And it certainly makes way more than that, even on my worst month. Right. And to the same degree, we basically, OK, if I want to do this or if you're you like, OK, how do I actually build for cheapness? All right. So there's three ways that I think about this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You guys are awesome. We had our highest month ever in terms of downloads for the podcast. And the only person that I can think is you guys.

because you're the only ones who share this. And so I keep making these because you keep sharing them. So thank you. But if you know somebody, you have an employee, can you share it with your team on Slack? If you have a friend, can you text it or DM them? Or if it's just something that you think you would want to share with your audience because it's something that resonated with you, please put it on your gram, on the IG, or maybe on your LinkedIn's.

or whatever it is that you like to share with your audience, or maybe send it as an email. Why not? Let's get crazy. It would mean the world to me, and maybe it might mean the world to them. So number one is you can have AI, right? Day one. Now, a lot of you guys should already be investing in this stuff. For sure, AI is giving the best employees 10x the leverage they had before. And so if there's ever been a time to pay people better, it's been today, because AI is now taking your best person and making it 10 times as effective. So it's like, why would you not

Like you're always like, man, if I could have 10, 10 Johns or 10 Daniels or 10, 10 Michaels, man, that would be amazing. It's like, well, AI is giving you 10 Michaels. And so be willing to pay the Michaels of your business more because you actually do get more from them now more than ever. So number one is AI. The second is I'll just say automation. Cause I think automation for some reason has like been forgotten about. There's still lots of stuff that can get automated that doesn't necessarily need to have AI, but you build day one with those automations in place. Now the third is,

is offshore rate, right? Or near shore rate. Basically paying significantly less for the same labor. But you're actually making this your entire business strategy from day one. We're going to win by being the cheapest. And if that's you, then you state that

First and foremost, in your marketing, in your sales, and what's really cool about it is typically when you're on the cheapest, the sales are pretty easy. Marketing is not that hard. The difficulty is being profitable. But I've seen some tremendously profitable businesses that structure themselves from day one on being the cheapest. And a little tidbit, a little pro tip that I think a lot of business owners are going to miss out on. I think people are not getting this. If you do all this stuff, let's say you do the offshoring, you do the automation, you do the I.

You don't need to tell your customers. You can just have AI automation and offshoring into your business and you just sell a normal service. You need to tell them you have a bunch of VAs in the Philippines. You need to tell them that a lot of your stuff is from AI. Don't say, hey, we're an AI design firm. Just be a design firm and then charge the same rates or a good deal for design because you just have an automated backend. Great.

Amazing. So that'll allow you to get more cash for the business and also be probably more value. All right. So three vectors so far. Speed. How do I do it faster than anyone else in the market? Risk. How do I do it more reliably and build a reputation better than anyone else in the market? Cost. How do we do it cheaper, consistently, and still be profitable than anyone else in the market? And finally, you have ease. Now, before I dive into ease, I want to make this point. If you just went on one of these, you could have an incredibly successful business. If you could do multiple vectors, then you'll crush everyone.

A quote that I like is, the best for the most people for the least. And so best probably takes into account speed and ease and risk.

And for the most, it's going to be like total number of people that it helps. And then for the least, right? It's like, and I've had different ones. It's like unique, expensive, sticky air. How do I do something that no one else can do? How do I have it that they keep buying it? How do I have it that I have high gross margins? And how do I have it so it's over and over and over again, right? And so we think about these little monikers. I think about this when I'm trying to build a business because ultimately these are the ways that you win. These are the strategic modes. So people talk about strategy, but fundamentally it's going to have to ladder up to one of these things, right? So

So if you're like, oh, by the way, what's acquisition.com? It's going to be this one, probably primarily. And then I would say secondary vectors are these. We're obviously not cheapest, right? And so that's where I've built my business around. Now, if I had a different, now, not all the businesses in our portfolio are built that way.

Right. We have a teeth whiting chain that's more around speed, ease and cheapness. Right. And so you get like you have to make sure that the strategy is is best tailored to the customer avatar you're trying to serve. All right. Let's talk about ease. So I want to make a big point about ease.

If you want to make your product more convenient for customers, you don't make something convenient because we want to like, I want to do something to my product. It's actually the opposite, which is why I think most products suck. You make something easier by removing everything that is no longer required. You make something easy by saying what is hard about this and then removing everything that's hard. And so what's cool about this process is all like, like easy is not the outcome.

It's removing all hard and then easy happens as a consequence, right? So like easy is not noticeable. It's like good design. It should vanish, right? Like if you look at an iPhone, an iPhone is the result of what happens when you remove everything that sucks about a phone and what remains is an iPhone.

The UX vanishes into the screen. There's no menus. You just hit what you need. It immediately opens up, right? This is how we have to think about ease. And so this happens for services. It happens for products. And just like I was saying earlier with if many variables exist, many variables must be studied. And the nice thing is that customers will tell you what's hard thing number one, what's hard thing number two, what's hard thing number three, what's hard thing number four.

And you have that list. And then the way that you make something easy is one at a time, crossing things out one at a time until eventually people are like, man, this thing just works. And that takes work. Right? And so take a thing, figure out what makes it hard, remove all those pieces. And then what you're left with is something that's easy. This is the work.

And I wish I could say this in a hundred different ways, but like, honestly, that's the game. And so when we're thinking about this, it's like, as a customer, like you want to think again, click to close to delivered. So when a customer is coming into your ecosystem, into your world, right? Or like how much information do they need to get? Do they have to give information, the same information on multiple calls? Are we passing calls to two reps? Like, I'll give you a really simple example. So right now you probably have, like, if you have a business that sells via appointments, right? You have phone calls, you have people who made the calls.

If you have multiple calls that occur in order for someone to buy, let me tell you what happens all the time.

Call one. Tell me about your business. All right. Tell me about the size of the business. Tell me about some qualifications. Okay, cool. So then let me set you up with Charlie. Charlie will get you set up. Okay, cool. Now we get on the phone with Charlie three days later. Charlie's like, hey, how's it going? What's the revenue of the business? What's the size of the business? You're like, dude, I just told the, why am I telling, I hate you already, right? And so instead of doing that, let me show you. The thing is that this is a very binary outcome. This is a very binary one. A lot of them are more continuous, but this is binary.

And the only thing easier than doing what I'm about to share with you is not doing it, which is why most people don't. Your salespeople, your setters, or your salespeople in general should take notes on the customers. And here's what's cool. If you start the second call and say, hey, had a conversation with Charlie. Charlie told me that your revenue is this, your industry is this, and the biggest issue you're dealing with is this. Does that sound about right? They're going to be like, wow, they actually did some homework. This is a pretty buttoned up operation. You know what? That just made it.

easier. And so we have to think about every single little step. That's just the sale. And if you don't think that how you sell affects their perception of the quality of service that you have, you're kidding yourself. Many people will make a judgment based on how good your product is, based on how good your sales motion is, how clean it is, how dialed it is. If you call someone in 30 seconds, they're like, man, these guys are on it. They would imagine that if you make a promise about speed later, guess what the

past experience they have that they're going to use as judgment is on the sales process. And so this, again, I'm just talking about sales because everyone like, you know, everybody likes talking about sales, but well, I like talking about sales. Fine.

Caught me. On the flip side is the back end is the same thing. What's the onboarding call look like? What are the activation points? What are the touch points with the customer? What kind of reporting are we going to provide to them so they know that we're delivering them value? What things do we give? Are we giving a massage? Are we giving a map where we show them where the pain is? And we show them, hey, when they come back in, this is where you said last time you were in pain. How's that auto scale from one to 10 today? Wow, that was really...

really good. Like, I mean, can you imagine you walk into a massage place that you've been to before and they're like, oh, last time you struggled with your shoulder. And the reason that so many people like just going with the same person is because the business have so few processes. And so it's like, well, I might as well just go with the same masseuse because she knows me. But if every masseuse or massager, I don't know the male version, whatever, massager, already knew the pain that you were dealing with before

beforehand, could you imagine what a superior experience that would be as a company? And then also, how much more would you be able to keep customers? Whereas when the masseuse leaves, they take all the customers that went with them. Not very sticky. But if every massage person knew all the pain points of the business, that would make it easier. Easy is when everything that's hard vanishes and that's all that's left is the value. Now,

If you're looking at these four, how can I do it faster? How can I make more reliable? How can I do it cheaper? How can I make it easier for the customer? The end state, the kill shot is that you have all four. Now to have all four, it almost always has to be tech. Now you can typically have three of the four if you have labor. All right. So if you have a service-based business, you're basically going to need to pick three, but specifically you need to make sure you have one. Now, why am I so hard on this one thing? Well,

Customers do not understand multiple benefits. Now, they can, like, from a messaging perspective. Now, when they buy something, they experience it, that's different. But from a marketing angle, if you say, hey, we're the fastest, we're the least risky, and we're the easiest, it's too much. Just focus on the core vector. And if you're like, which one do I pick? Pick the one that values the most to your customer. Pick the one that they care about the most.

And so if you know that your people care the most about speed, then speed's the angle. If there's a huge cost when something doesn't go well with the business, then risk is the angle, right? Or the customer, whatever, right? And if it's just in general a huge pain to do this thing, then how can I make it easy? So I'll tell you, there's a lady that I know in Albuquerque, New Mexico that I used to go to church with when I went to church.

And she had a massive business in New Mexico. And her entire business was built on one thing. Speed.

and ease. And so she had a DMV business where she just privatized getting people their IDs. That was it. That's all it was. And I remember her talking to me and she was like, yeah, they just passed a new law that everybody in New Mexico has to get a new ID because we just changed the license. And she was like, well, that's, you know, 12 million people times 50 bucks. Yeah.

And I just remember her saying that. I was like, how elegant, right? And the thing is, is that her $50 is like, she was able to get people in and out in 15 minutes from the time they walked in the door to the time they left. Could you imagine how lovely of an experience that would be? Everybody, when they think about getting their ID right now, it's like just

pain, all you think is just like waste of a day, just frustration, dealing with inept people who have no urgency, no regard for other people, and just generally deal with you as a nuisance. Like you're somehow inconveniencing them in their day of not working that you have disrupted their day of not working by existing and breathing on them.

Of course you hate them. And so she just had a business not hard to beat when that's the standard. Again, there are industries that are like this that are privatized that still no one tries to compete in. And so if you're wondering, which of these do I pick? Obviously, you start with the customer reverse backwards. But let's do the DMV example that I just said. Is she going to win on being cheaper than the government? No.

No, I'm pretty sure it's free or it's a nominal price in order to get the new IDs. And so she's not going to win on cheap. But what else could she win on? Speed, ease. In other ways, the ease can also be like positive customer experience. Like those are things that improve the overall experience for the customer. Could she double her prices? I'll bet you plenty of people would be willing to pay $100 to not have to waste a day, right? So she doesn't have to win on this, right? So she has to pick the one that... Now, risk, I mean, as long as you get the ID, I mean, you have to be...

good enough at this, right? But she's going to work on her reputation by having a reputation of being faster and easier, right? And so if you're trying to pick one, you pick the one that's going to matter most to the customer. And if you are competing in a space that has a lot of cheap or sometimes even free competitors, just remember this.

Fast beats free. So back in the day, there was Napster, which some of you guys may have remembered. It's probably before actually, probably half of y'all's time. There's something called LimeWire that happened later. There was Kazaa. There's all these different basically shareware things where you could share files with one another and ultimately just like steal music for free. I'll just be honest. That's what it was, right? So when that was happening, how did a company like Spotify come in not really free and beat them?

They won on speed and they went on risk because when you download a line wire, you knew that you were downloading all sorts of viruses to your computer. Number one. And the number two on Spotify, it was like, it was just, you just pick the song. You can immediately start listening to it. And so they beat an industry that was literally free by being faster. And, and,

I remember when I went to get Chipotle once, this was at University of Maryland. I was visiting the campus. And I think it's like the number one highest grossing Chipotle in the nation. This thing is packed. It's in the middle of the commons or whatever, right? And it happened to be Halloween, the weekend that I went to visit, you can imagine. And so at Halloween for Chipotle, they do this thing where if you wear any kind of foil, you dress up like a burrito, they give you free burritos or whatever.

And I didn't know, I didn't think that that was the day that I wanted to go have Chipotle. So I walk up and I'm like, oh my, and it was, it was, imagine a grocery store parking lot. So massive parking lot. There's a Chipotle there. The line stretched through the entire parking lot. It was insane. And I just remember thinking to myself when I got there and I was like, I would pay $20 to just have the burrito that I want and not have to wait in this line, even if it's free. And that was the moment where I sensed that, that, that, that concept fast beats free.

So if you're not sure, start with the customer, reverse backwards, look at the competitive landscape. You're probably one of these four vectors or maybe more. And so if you want to get into a new space or you already have a business and you're like, how do I actually win? I feel like I'm the same as everybody else. Pick one and dominate. With that being said, rock and roll. Hope you enjoy this and I'll see you guys next time.