If you're new here, Welcome! To learn more about what this site is all about click here [link]. Thanks for visiting!

Despite what you might think, great businesses are not created simply from a great idea. We’d all love to think that we can simply invent the next “Killer App”, then sit back and watch the cash roll in. It doesn’t quite work that way.

If great ideas don’t generate great businesses, what does?

The long and complicated answer is how you specifically position yourself and your company to fulfill an action plan based upon an idea. The short answer is: your productive action.

In order to differentiate yourself and your idea, you don’t need a patent or some proprietary method. You need enthusiasm, discipline, and a focused plan that allows you to outperform your competition every day of the week.

Think of your competition like your favorite professional sports league. There are dozens of teams which have talented players on them, but only one team that is going to perform better than everyone else. Your goal is to build that team.

Focus on Productive Action

There is a mighty chasm between having a great idea and executing flawlessly on a business model for a great idea.

Plenty of people have great ideas, but very few people execute their plans well. Productive action isn’t just about showing up for work every day and punching a clock. For the team that wins, productive action is about going above and beyond the call of duty each and every day.

• It’s about reaching out to your customer when there are no problems just to see how they are doing.
• It’s about releasing a product feature faster than your competitor even when you’re already ahead.
• It’s getting your workflow in order so that you are not the last one to leave at night.
• It’s doing what the guy next to you isn’t willing to do.

Take Care of Your Customer

Even a product that’s a basic item, like food, can take on a whole new meaning when you compare the service that comes with it. In your city there may be a hundred places where you can order a steak dinner, but only a few are considered first class.

The difference is that the top restaurants understand that in order to differentiate their product, they need to deliver better service. They pay attention to every detail of your experience, from the greeting you get at the door to whether you’re given a white or black napkin based on your pant color.

Exceptional service is by no means a commodity. It’s a rare and unusual thing that very few businesses can deliver.

Chances are your competition isn’t going to go the extra mile to service the heck out of your customer, which creates an incredibly powerful competitive advantage for you. Remember, it is your customer and you have to earn their business every day.

Find the Weak Spot

It’s not uncommon for a startup company to go toe-to-toe with a much larger company offering a very similar product. On its face, it looks like the startup is at a severe disadvantage. Surely BigCorp can provide better productive action and better service with its vast resources than a scrappy little startup can.

If you were to try to compete against the giant on their own terms you’d get creamed. That’s why startups tend to look for the weak spots in larger businesses and exploit them. You can easily differentiate your product from a larger company by focusing on stuff large businesses mess up all the time.

Unlike a large company, you can offer the personal service and attention your customers love and probably are missing from your bigger competitor. You can leverage your speed by releasing new versions of your product faster and responding to market conditions more quickly. You can offer talented team members stock options while BigCorp can only offer another phony-baloney bonus plan.

Every weak spot that you can exploit is another way to add value to your idea. Once you’ve identified the points, the more pressure you put on those weak spots, the more value you’ll build for your own product.

Putting It All Together

Outperforming your competition isn’t about doing any one of these things – it’s about doing all of them consistently. If your idea is great and novel, the only guarantee is that it will be copied. If it’s not, you have to wonder how great of an idea it really is.

When your idea does get copied, the only thing you’ll be able to rely upon is your team and your productive action. All of the points about going above and beyond the call of duty, servicing your customer, and exploiting the weak spots will soon be used against you.

The only defense against the next up and comer and the only way to consistently create value around your idea is to consistently execute the fundamental productive actions. Nothing else provides value.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/55zub5. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen