Strategic Coach Resources

The price tag on your sleeve.

The vast majority of entrepreneurial businesses are based on selling a product or service. The danger of focusing on products and services is that it reduces you to a commodity, too: You’re just a delivery mechanism for these things. In a globalized marketplace where clients and customers can choose from a vast number of competing products and services, sellers of commodities are in a tight squeeze. Do you compete by offering the lowest price? That’s hardly an appealing basis for your business relationships.

There are two mental traps that can keep you commoditized. This month, you’ll learn what these are and learn how to make the two shifts to free you from this predicament forever. Best of all, you already have everything you need.

The Specialization Trap™.

If you ask most entrepreneurs what they do, they’ll describe themselves by their job description, such as “I’m a financial advisor” or “I’m an equipment manufacturer.” By defining yourself by your specialty, you keep yourself firmly commoditized: There’s nothing in that description to distinguish you from anyone else who offers the same product or service. Not only does this force you into competition with all these others, it also means that your fortunes are bound to the successes and failures of that industry.

An entrepreneur with a specialty.

The first shift to free you from commoditization involves taking an important step backwards in your thinking to free up your sense of perspective. Consider that you are not your specialty, but an entrepreneur who has a specialty in your industry. This isn’t just semantics. This simple mental shift frees you to expand in endless new ways.

Ask yourself: If you’re just another seller, why do your clients and customers come to you? In your best relationships, the reason is something beyond the products and services you sell. The quality that drew these people to you is the core of who you are as an entrepreneur.

As an experienced entrepreneur, you have a certain innate wisdom. You know much more now than you did on your first day of business, both about the particulars of your industry and of your clients’ and customers’ needs. This wisdom allows you to provide more and better solutions than ever. Your business is really just a distribution channel for your wisdom.

When you see that you are not your specialization, but an entrepreneur with specialized wisdom, you are freed to out-compete the others in your industry, and to innovate where they are obliged to comply.

As an exercise, say this to yourself: “I am an entrepreneur with a specialty in [your industry].” Notice how this lifts you above the industry, and sets you apart from it as a free agent.

The Industry Trap™.

All of your clients and prospects live outside of your industry. They’re not interested in its rules, its problems, or its preoccupations. In fact, most of these people would have gone quite happily through life without meeting you, except that a problem or opportunity arose in their lives, and you had a crucial ability to create a solution for them.

As long as you relate to your clients and customers through the filter of your industry, seeing them as potential buyers of products and services, you will remain commoditized, and be stuck in The Industry Trap™. This trap limits you to thinking in its terms, acting as an extension of it. The alternative is to package and sell your wisdom.

Packaging your wisdom.

As an entrepreneur with specialized wisdom, your job is to find the people for whom that can make the most difference. Ask yourself: How can I package the wisdom I have to create value for people?

At the moment, you’re probably giving away the most valuable part of your business — your wisdom — for free, while you focus on selling products and services. The second shift involves refocusing your business to concentrate on the process by which you deliver these things, and charging for that. Within a complete problem-solving process, people are actually more inclined to buy products and services, and buy more of them, than when considering those products and services on their own.

When you’ve identified what your wisdom is, you may begin to see more ways of distributing it. This has happened to several of our clients, who have identified processes so unique and valuable that the core of their business has shifted to selling or teaching those processes to others. Some of these solutions have proven threatening to the industry they emerged from, but customers have reacted so favorably and invested so much money in them that the industry has been forced to change and accommodate this new offering or risk being left behind.

Intellectual Property versus Intellectual Capital.

Some people hoard their experience, often retiring or dying with it intact. This is the path of Intellectual Property — secretive, perishable, and limited. Instead of going this route, the entrepreneurs mentioned above — these Industry Transformers™ — have brought their wisdom to the marketplace, turning it into “Intellectual Capital” by packaging it and selling it to others, either as a process to participate in or a system for others to learn and deliver themselves.

The second shift, which will free you from The Industry Trap, involves an adjustment in your thinking about what business you’re in. Again, a tiny mental adjustment gives you enormous freedom, as it takes your future and your creative potential out of your industry’s hands and places it back into yours. Here’s the adjustment: Instead of thinking of yourself as “in” your industry, consider the following statement, and say it to yourself: “We are an Intellectual Capital Company, and [your specialty] is one of our distribution channels.”

How long do these shifts take?

You can accomplish the first mental shift immediately, simply by recognizing the distinction between you as an entrepreneur and your specialty. The second shift, the transition from an industry firm to an Intellectual Capital Company, is a longer process that usually takes about five years. Hundreds of entrepreneurs in our programs have already made this shift, and thousands of others are midway through the process. Their work has proven that, as an entrepreneur, you can become permanently free from the limitations, controls, and ills of any one industry — creating unique value in the lives of your clients and customers, and transforming your business in the process to make it more profitable and secure.