Category: Growth Series

I recently saw an ad trying to drum up workers for Amazon warehouses. The headline on the ad said, “Work close to home.” I thought to myself, “There is an advertising agency laboring to polish a turd.” The ad’s reasoning was that the primary benefit that Amazon can offer workers is that it might be in their neighborhood. The subtext is, “Work like a dog, for peanuts, in a job with no future, but the commute is short.”

A common story around growth is that you just need marketing to get the word out. While not entirely false, it’s not true either.

Marketing cannot create demand. It can only amplify it.

I write a lot about applying strengths. Our unique capabilities give us advantages over competitors. But nature has a way of balancing the scales. Often what makes us exceptional is also what makes us vulnerable.

As a simple example, when you position a business you develop a unique capability in getting customers from a certain market. But it comes with an accompanying cost of losing customers in other markets.

Strengths walk hand-in-hand with weaknesses.

The trick is to manage the context so that strengths are effective and weaknesses don’t matter.

“Lots of people have grey hairs they don’t want and this service would enable them to get touch ups the same time as their haircut,” a teenage girl told me. I’ve plenty of grey hairs and I wanted to crack a joke, but just nodded. The girl was dressed in a business jacket and a conservative skirt and we sat across a table in a wide ballroom at a Holiday Inn. As a judge, I’d been instructed to offer little feedback or questions other than the two that were given to me. The teenager was one of twenty that I judged yesterday as part of the state competition for DECA.

DECA is a vocational training organization that prepares high school students to work in business. It’s a co-curricular class where students learn business concepts as part of school and then compete at events like the one I was a judge at. “It’s really a cult,” a mother helping at the conference told me, “The kids get really into it.” I was there because I care about education and business and the opportunity presented itself through the local Rotary.

I judged entrepreneurship. The teens were given business cases where they had to argue a proposal to me, their business partner. One of the cases was expanding a product or service line for a mobile hair cutting business. Hence, the dye for my unsightly grey hairs. In addition to dye as a service line extension, students proposed make-up, pedicures, manicures, wardrobe consulting, and even facial massages.