“We do that.” Seems like it is more than just an ad that lands between innings of a baseball game. For the last decade most businesses have been trying to be everything to their customers. The reasons are understandable. For the transmission shop, there are fewer failures and therefore fewer rebuilds. There are also those diagnostic tools that need to be fed so it makes sense to diversify your product and service offerings. For the general repair shop, there are fewer break downs and cars are going longer between service intervals. Seems like it makes sense to start working on transmissions, right?
It seems to me that much of the diversification or expansion of product offerings has two distinct problems. The first problem I have seen is a lack of investment in training and tooling to really do it right. The result is inferior quality and rather than increasing market share, it may actually reduce it. The second thing that sort of mystifies me is choosing the new product or service that is saturated with competitors, on the decline or where there is a very strong competitor that does it much better than you do.
Most of us who started and prevailed in running a business did so because we thought we could do something better. I have seen several friends and some of my suppliers offer new services that came up very short of their competition with an attitude that it wasn’t their main revenue stream so they could just dabble in it and see how it goes. After a year or two, they abandon the failed cash cow and chalk it up to something their customers just weren’t ready for, or something like that.
With the complexity of doing business, limited resources with which to make mistakes and the difficulty of properly staffing projects like this, it seems to me that a different approach might be a safer and more profitable way to go.
A few weeks ago I was approached by a PR firm to heavily flex our staff’s ability to breathe new life into old cars, four of them to be exact in 5 weeks. We had to buy them, build them, modify them with stereos, televisions, iPads and trick body wraps and ship them to four different markets. My answer was, “Sure, we can do it, but we will be calling on our friends to meet our time schedule.”
As I planned the project, I started out with the thought that we had the skills to do all of this. The truth was, once I really looked closer, I couldn’t afford any mistakes on such a tight time schedule so it made financial sense to tap a few friends to take on parts of the project that were within their specialty areas.
We worked very closely for three of the 5 weeks, sometimes merging our teams into one facility and working round the clock. One unanticipated benefit that came from all of this was that each business got a better sense of what the others’ strengths were. Since that time, we have been referring customers back and forth much more than we used to, and I think we are all a little less likely to try to say, “We do that,” to each others’ work.
You may wonder where the profit is in that. The reality is that we have been growing a community of different service providers for a number of years. We all refer customers to one another and wind up doing more of what we are truly good at.
So what is the moral of my story? Maybe it makes more sense for a parts supplier to be a great parts supplier that works with a great trade association that works with great benefit providers all excelling at their specialty. I guess you choose; Jack of all trades, master of none or leader in your field of expertise with a lot of friends?
“We do that.” Seems like it is more than just an ad that lands between innings of a baseball game. For the last decade most businesses have been trying to be everything to their customers. The reasons are understandable. For the transmission shop, there are fewer failures and therefore fewer rebuilds. There are also those diagnostic tools that need to be fed so it makes sense to diversify your product and service offerings. For the general repair shop, there are fewer break downs and cars are going longer between service intervals. Seems like it makes sense to start working on transmissions, right?
It seems to me that much of the diversification or expansion of product offerings has two distinct problems. The first problem I have seen is a lack of investment in training and tooling to really do it right. The result is inferior quality and rather than increasing market share, it may actually reduce it. The second thing that sort of mystifies me is choosing the new product or service that is saturated with competitors, on the decline or where there is a very strong competitor that does it much better than you do.
Most of us who started and prevailed in running a business did so because we thought we could do something better. I have seen several friends and some of my suppliers offer new services that came up very short of their competition with an attitude that it wasn’t their main revenue stream so they could just dabble in it and see how it goes. After a year or two, they abandon the failed cash cow and chalk it up to something their customers just weren’t ready for, or something like that.
With the complexity of doing business, limited resources with which to make mistakes and the difficulty of properly staffing projects like this, it seems to me that a different approach might be a safer and more profitable way to go.
A few weeks ago I was approached by a PR firm to heavily flex our staff’s ability to breathe new life into old cars, four of them to be exact in 5 weeks. We had to buy them, build them, modify them with stereos, televisions, iPads and trick body wraps and ship them to four different markets. My answer was, “Sure, we can do it, but we will be calling on our friends to meet our time schedule.”
As I planned the project, I started out with the thought that we had the skills to do all of this. The truth was, once I really looked closer, I couldn’t afford any mistakes on such a tight time schedule so it made financial sense to tap a few friends to take on parts of the project that were within their specialty areas.
We worked very closely for three of the 5 weeks, sometimes merging our teams into one facility and working round the clock. One unanticipated benefit that came from all of this was that each business got a better sense of what the others’ strengths were. Since that time, we have been referring customers back and forth much more than we used to, and I think we are all a little less likely to try to say, “We do that,” to each others’ work.
You may wonder where the profit is in that. The reality is that we have been growing a community of different service providers for a number of years. We all refer customers to one another and wind up doing more of what we are truly good at.
So what is the moral of my story? Maybe it makes more sense for a parts supplier to be a great parts supplier that works with a great trade association that works with great benefit providers all excelling at their specialty. I guess you choose; Jack of all trades, master of none or leader in your field of expertise with a lot of friends?
