The Myth of the Slight Edge

Being an entrepreneur is like stepping onto a wide open playing field where a whole bunch of games are being played.

You can either join someone else’s game or create your own.

Yet most of us find ourselves playing someone else’s game and looking for a slight edge to beat them.

And then we wonder why it's so hard to win?!

That’s why I want to smash the idea that a slight edge is all it takes to win and sharing three uncommon strategies to create your own game and give yourself an unfair advantage in business.

So let’s start with this…

History is littered with examples of businesses that tried to compete with a slight edge.

Just look at Samsung phones.

Samsung tries to compete with Apple by being slightly better.

Processing power, camera, memory, whatever.

But Apple basically created the smartphone category as we know it.

So Apple just kept trucking along and selling a metric crapload of iPhones.

So clearly, a slight edge isn’t enough to WIN.

The idea of the slight edge comes from high-performance athletics.

Where sometimes that slight edge might be the difference between being a champion and being a footnote in the history books.

But athletics isn't really the best analogy for business.

Athletics is a finite game with a defined set of rules.

Business is the opposite. It's an infinite game.

Other than ethical and legal stuff, there are no rules in business.

So a slight edge isn’t enough. You need an unfair advantage.

That means creating your own game.

So here's the first way to create your own game....

Strategy 1) Blend 2 wildly different things into something that’s new and uncopy-able.

Dilbert creator Scott Adams is a great example.

Self-proclaimed mediocre cartoonist AND mediocre comedy writer, yet he somehow managed to put those two things together into Dilbert, and made himself a millionaire, a best-selling author, keynote speaker, entrepreneur and investor in the process.

So the question here is: What 2 elements, attributes or skills could you combine to create something uncopy-able and valuable to others?

Go read Scott Adams book for more on this approach.

Strategy 2) Change the business model

Google did this in search.

Rather than simply taking money to run some ads on their home page, Google create their own game.

They built a self-serve ad platform that put Google at the center and opened a whole new source of revenue from small and medium-sized businesses.

Down in Australia my friend Glenn Twiddle changed the business model of real estate coaching.

He put on high-level events and brought celebrity entrepreneurs like Richard Branson and Gary Vee to his native Australia, which put way more butts in the seat than he could on his own.

He then put himself in the center of the action by running and emcee-ing the event, and followed up with attendees to sell programs and services.

Which means the events didn’t need to be profitable on their own.

Those events created the audience and influence he leveraged to build two different 7 figure businesses.

For more details on that approach, read Glenn's book Punching Above Your Weight.

So the question here is: How can you change the business model and put yourself at the center of the action and open up other sources of revenue?

And finally…

Strategy 3) Radically Simplify

Do the work to take something complex and make it simple.

Amazon is a great example. They made online commerce so radically simple that you can actually order things by accident!

My core business is also based on this strategy.

I took my own wild ride of building a show with millions of views and downloads, took all that chaos and distilled it into a system. Then I built a digital agency that sold that system, completely done-for-you.

In other words, I radically simplified the process of launching and producing a show online, which means the business grew even though I wasn’t a brilliant salesperson.

So the question is, What can you radically simplify to create something new, rare and valuable?

For more on this approach, read Richard Koch's book, Simplify.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of game-changing strategies, but hopefully they get your brain working.

And here’s the Timeless Principle in all this: You don’t have to play someone else’s game. You can create your own game and give yourself an unfair advantage.