I just watched a great video by Kevin O’Leary (Mr. Wonderful) speaking about the concept of ”knowing what you’re bad at”. It's linked here, so go watch it real quick (it’s only about 30 seconds) then come back.
Welcome Back
Seeing Kevin's video today inspired me to write a little bit about this topic from my personal experience, as I couldn’t agree more with him. I also believe this concept, if you really take it seriously, could change your approach to business as it did mine -- let me explain.
Be Good at Being Bad - The Concept
Now, at a glance this concept may seem like circular logic or non-sensical click-bait, but hear me out. The idea is simple, and takes effort to get it right over the long term, but it can be a game changer for business and personal efficiency.
Here we go: As a person or a business, it's always best to be honest and self-reflective about what you're actually best at and what you choose to not be best at.
And the way to keep yourself honest here is by acknowledging the true limiting factor for both of these — and that is simply your time and your resources.
- For a person, you only have so much time and money to spend on obtaining knowledge and becoming an expert at something. If you only scratch the surface on numerous or multiple disciplines or skills, you're relegating yourself to be the proverbial jack-of-all-trades = master of none. The alternative is to go deep and become expert in a small handful of capabilities, and find support or hire people to augment and own what you choose not to be best at.
- For a business, you should focus your time and capital, investing in services or products for which you are able to deliver truly expert results in. This helps avoid the dangerous temptation to try and appeal to everyone. Over the long term, this focus will allow you to better utilize your limited talent and capital on fewer initiatives yielding better results, while intentionally underinvesting in what you choose to not be best at.
Not My Idea - Check Out Frances Frei
To be clear, I didn’t come up with this concept on my own, hearing Kevin speak about this today reminded me of an amazing experience I was given by the wonderful David Hughes - Former CEO of TheSearchAgency. David sent a handful of us to attend a Harvard Business School presentation on building/growing successful businesses. At that presentation, I heard from and met one speaker who stood out to me: Frances X. Frei
If you haven’t listened to or read any of Frances' work, do yourself a favor today, and check out this HBS page. Frances is an expert on building sustainable business processes, and when I saw her back in 2012 she shared her Uncommon Service Framework. In that presentation, she spoke about being good at being bad. To hear all about this, in her own words, you can (and should) watch this podcast where Frances explains this idea in her masterful way, and in much better detail than I could ever hope to.
Business Example of Being Good at Being Bad
One of her best examples to quickly and clearly get the point across here is Walmart. She detailed that at the time, Walmart is known for offering the lowest prices compared to any competitor. However, this comes with a trade-off that Walmart gladly embraces to this day. They're also known to have bad customer service.
I bet you know, exactly what she means. Walk into your neighborhood Walmart and try to find someone to help you pickup a USB speaker. Be sure to ask detailed questions about the version and new features. Or ask about the new Apple AirPods and which languages it can translate on the fly. Better yet, try to get in and check-out quickly with a human cashier! At Walmart, there is often 20 check-out lanes with only 2 cashiers for the entire store... but they have dozens of self-check-out kiosks.
Do you get it?
- This setup allows Walmart to focus limited resources on the things they "choose to be good at" = low pricing.
- They then underinvest in those other things "they have decided to be bad at" = customer service.
Why This Resonated With Me
I think this concept resonated with me due to a bit of timing. I had joined the Agency world in 2007 and by 2012 I'd been through a lot of challenges with clients. Something that I was running into a lot, was the issue of needing to offer all kinds of new products and services, to appear to literally “do it all”.
In addition, our sales team were under a lot of pressure to keep us growing, so they would often get creative and offer services that we weren’t entirely experienced doing yet.
Now don't get me wrong, the speed of innovation is what I LOVE about the Agency world. However I kept finding myself joining the chorus of people on Client Services to complain about Sales asking us for too much of our time. After all, we needed to "do the work" right?
Big Changes to Client Services
After hearing Frances, I started to realize that my Sales team wasn't wrong, our approach together was just a bit off. A good Sales team should push Client Services to deliver more diverse work. However, if Client Services isn't bought into this dynamic, it will create a real disconnect between the teams.
My solution was a clear set of guiding principles:
This new approach
- Reduced confusion about offering things we weren't capable of expertly delivering
- Clarified information sharing between the two teams regarding market demands
- Positioned Client Services in the lead for developing new offerings, and training the Sales team on how to sell them
For the last bit, the key here was planning and testing. We stopped throwing everything at the wall, and limited our new product offerings to the things we were confident we could deliver expert service and support for, and were upfront when we could not.
Wrap-Up
In other words, don't try to do everything, but do every thing well.
Ok, that's everything I wanted to say on this topic. If you have questions or follow-ups for me, please reach out! Thanks for reading!
Information Sources
