“Our competition copies everything we do. No kidding. Our newspaper ads. Our yellow pages. We even changed our logo, and they changed theirs.”
This is what one of my clients told me in our first visit together. A midwestern heating and air conditioning company – they’d been referred to me by another one of my clients.
They had been down or flat for a few years. This was 2008.
Within a few hours, I had diagnosed the problem.
You see, they were already good at what they did. Very good. The owner was an expert among experts. He was so good that he taught heating and air conditioning classes at the local technical college.
And Dr. Comfort was born, and so began a brand and a strategy all built around being the smartest, the most highly-trained and the one who best understands higher degrees of comfort.
He’d been teaching there for years, but he never thought it was relevant. He didn’t think customers would care. Turns out, they did. A lot.
Yesterday, in his Monday Morning Memo, my partner and mentor Roy H. Williams wrote:
Every business owner has a blind spot. Do you know yours?
That was a trick question. Of course you don’t know your blind spot. If you knew it was there, it wouldn’t be a blind spot.
When a business owner can’t figure out how to take his company to the next level, it’s usually because the stairway that will take him there is hiding behind his blind spot.
You can’t see your own blind spot because you’re on the inside, looking out. The first step of a good consultant is to be a friendly pair of eyes on the outside, looking in.
A friendly pair of eyes to help you evaluate your limiting factors.
A friendly pair of eyes to help you find the message you must shout to the world.
A friendly pair of eyes to show you the opportunity that hides behind your blind spot.
I’m very proud of my Wizard of Ads partners. They’re doing a lot of good for a lot of people.
Now, I’m sure those competitors think we’re nuts – running on the radio like darned fools – week after week – with no specials or price discounts. Why, we’re not even mentioning the brands we sell.
Yep. Nuts.
Double-digit growth nuts.
Year after year nuts.
Voted Contractor of the Year by their peers last month nuts.
We need a Doctor.
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