Do You Have The Right To Play There?

Photo by Maarten van den Heuvel on Unsplash

If you’re going to be in business, then you should only be in business to solve problems. 

What I mean by that is that you aren’t doing what you do to simply ‘do work’, or to run a  business (for all of the budding entrepreneurs out there). 

You’re doing what you do because it helps your customer tackle a specific issue, something that they’re willing to pay good money (or some other form of consideration) to have tackled.

And in defining that problem that you’re helping to solve, there needs to be some specificity to what you bring to the table. This could be in any form - people, process and/or technology - but the underlying element is, at least to me, content. That is, you understand what their problem is, you get why it’s a problem and you have a clear vision as to why your solution is the best to solve it.

All too often, we lose that focus and get enamored by our capability: the fact that we can do a functional activity well and that that functional skill can be applied to many different industries and domains. 

That doesn’t mean we should. 

The question to ask, in that instance, is do we have the right to play there?

Do we understand the client domain? Do we have a handle on their specific problems? Do we live and breathe and speak the language of the industry? 

Look, I run a research and analytics firm and the skills we have within my teams can - theoretically - be applied to every function in the world. So, technically, the world is my oyster. Except it isn’t. The question I have to ask myself is, what do I know about that space? How can I help in a way that is something more than what someone else can do?

Not thinking this way is a path to Me-Too, to body shopping and, effectively, to commoditization. That’s fine if that’s what you want to do, but where’s the value? Where’s the future? What’s the point in running a race that’s simply a race to the bottom?

Better to stake your claim to a specific place, to learn its language, to understand its struggles and to move the needle forward in helping the folks there solve their problems.

That’s much more defensible, much more viable and ultimately much more profitable.