Back in 2008, Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick were standing in a cold rain, trying desperately to hail a cab at night in Paris and having no luck.
It’s a miserable experience that most of us have suffered through at one time or another (well, maybe not in Paris, but elsewhere).
And because of that shared, miserable experience, they started thinking about “what ifs.”
- What if, instead of having to stand out in the rain on a street corner, yelling and waving your arms frantically, you could simply use an app on the smartphone in your pocket to hail a cab?
- What if, instead of the cabbies finding you, you could easily find the closest taxi to you in the city?
- What if you could track your ride and know with accuracy when it’s going to arrive?
- And what if you could simply pay through your phone, too?
They didn’t have the answer to all of these questions immediately, but the idea was intriguing enough to follow through with, and within two years, the company, initially called UberCab (now Uber), was launched in beta in San Francisco.
And the rest, as they say, is history. Now, the old taxi cab business model has virtually been replaced by Uber and its copycats.
Uber’s Advantage: Be Different
You may be wondering why I’m bringing up Uber’s story in an blog post series for educational consultants looking to create killer offers for their audiences.
That’s fair.
Here’s why Uber’s story is applicable:
Because it demonstrates a key mindset that you need when creating the offers for your consulting business…
Don’t aim to be better; aim to be different.
Let’s go back to Camp and Kalanick, standing in the rain in Paris.
They already had several key components needed to come up with a great offer.
- They knew who the Ideal Client Avatar for this situation was–because they were the Ideal Client Avatar–people without transportation who need to get from one place to another in the city and are willing to pay someone to get them there.
- They also knew, intimately, the ICA’s problems. The basic problem is needing transportation from point A to point B, and traditional taxi services provided a solution to that. But there were many other problems with the status quo: it sometimes took a long time to find a cab, you had to actually hail the cab and get the driver’s attention, you sometimes had multiple people fighting over a single cab, and on and on. And the old-style cab service didn’t have solutions to any of these problems.
- And Camp and Kalanick didn’t have to do anything in the way of competitor analysis because they, like everyone else, already knew how existing cab companies worked, and they were all the same.
But here’s where Camp and Kalanick took that basic information about a specific market and did something extraordinary.
You see, most people, thinking about a business challenge, think in terms of, “How could I do it better?”
What would “better” have looked like in regards to the taxi industry before 2010? Newer cabs than the competitors? More luxury car options? Nicer interiors? A catchier company name and slogan? A slightly lower per-mile charge?
All of these things are tiny, incremental differences that would never do enough to set one cab company apart from another in any meaningful way–which means that they all tended to look the same to the consumer, and the entire industry was commoditized.
But Camp and Kalanick didn’t think about making the cab industry better. They brainstormed how the whole set of problems faced by this particular Ideal Client Avatar could be solved in an entirely different way.
And as a result, they revolutionized the “getting people without transportation from point A to point B in the city” industry and wiped out the cab industry as we once knew it in a few short years (and, oh yeah, became millionaires in the bargain).
So, What Does this Mean for Educational Consultants Like You?
If, in the course of your competitor analysis, you discovered that your current offerings of workshops, keynote topics, and consulting were very similar to a number of your top competitors (highly likely), what should you do about that?
If you try to stick with those offers and tweak them to be “better,” what would that look like? Would you offer more workshop or consulting dates in your package than your competitors? Would you provide more materials? Would you offer to do the same work as a competitor at a lower price and pitch it as “more value”?
All of these are minor tweaks that aren’t likely to move the needle with your Ideal Clients–and all of these “solutions” put you on the hook for doing much more work in order to compete. Not good.
The last item there, trying to compete by undercutting your competitor’s price, is especially deadly for your business. It might get you a few gigs in the short term, but then others will simply match your price in a “race to the bottom.” Pretty soon, none of the service providers in your field will be able to afford to stay in business.
No, trying to be “better” than your competitors is a recipe for disaster. Instead, be different.
Focus on being qualitatively different from your competitors. And if you’ve completed the action steps in this series of blog posts about positioning over the past several months, you have all the data you need to to this.
I’m not going to get into the nuts and bolts of how to do this differentiation today, but we’ll dig into it starting with my next post.
So, stay tuned.
To Your Success,
Willy
