As my practice grows rapidly south of the border, I’ve been chatting to a lot of taxi drivers. They’re upset. Often they have to work longer hours to make the same fare. In some cities, their business is almost reduced to nil. If you travel to the US a lot, you might be aware that this huge phenomenon is thanks to game changers in the cab industry called Uber (the service where regular citizens like you and me can give a lift and charge a cheaper fee than cabs) and Lyft. In any city those two companies enter, the taxi business is rapidly going away.
Gone Baby Gone
When I spoke to a young driver at the Toronto airport and asked him about if Uber was hurting his business, he hadn’t even heard of the name. He will soon, I promise.
What about how Airbnb is now, by a measure of hotel rooms, the largest hotel company in the world? For those who haven’t been initiated, Airbnb is the company that has made hotels out of every dwelling willing to rent out to strangers without the benefit of being a hotel or a b&b.
The Future is Coming
In other news, the super-smart Elon Musk just announced Tesla (the gazillion dollar sexy electric car) has a new Powerwall, a lithium-ion battery (starts at $3,000) that stores the sunlight generated from your solar panels, taking you completely off the power grid. Even something as mundane as a thermostat has entered the digital age with Nest (now owned by Google).
How Do You Keep Up?
When the world around you is shifting and innovating so quickly and you’re swimming against the current of competitors, there’s only one thing you can do–Specialize. That’s right. You need to know more and be more and do more about one thing and one thing alone. That’s what will make you a specialist, an expert, a thought leader and a generally sought out consultant about the one thing you’ve decided to concentrate on.
Innovate Much?
The only way I know how to innovate is to become an expert in that one pain point of one focused target group. I help clients pick either an industry or a group of people who gather by virtue of a similar interest. Then once they get to really know these folks and deeply understand their specific challenges, I help them innovate in ways to help their ideal clients around that same pain point. For example, because my clients are consultants and their pain point is the inability to get in front of high quality, high paying clients, I’ve created a system and a tracking mechanism called the Clientometer. It came directly from the insight that clients who were interfacing more with a high number of their ideal clients were closing more deals. So I found a counter device and married my marketing plan system to this gadget. I now use it in telling clients to go track 10 interactions in the next week on the Clientometer.
What’s Your Crowd’s Pain?
If you don’t know who your ideal crowd is or what pain point you should be helping them around, then check out my Market Demand Intensive where you can figure it out literally in 2 days. I fun this Intensive every month, the last 2 days of the month with a pre-call 2 weeks prior to train you on how to prep for the course. If you’ve already done your own research and have this narrowed down, reach out to your ideal clients and ask them what they’d like to see added to your program or what they wish were included in your work together. Then create a program or a product around it!
Keeping up with your competition is so much easier when you know exactly who you help and what you help them with. Don’t be a cab driver who is waiting in fear for Uber to come and put you out of business. Take the innovating of your industry into your own hands and drive your own results!
Want to find out if the market needs you? Follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, watch me on YouTube or connect with me on LinkedIn –and let’s talk
