Ep 227: Give Your Business a Check-Up

What we’re going to talk about today is how you can give your business a check-up.

I have a startup and I was just looking through my notes and my business plan and I’m getting ready to have a meeting with my partners and I just wanted to kinda go over things because I feel like we’re all over the place on what we’re trying to accomplish.

So I thought maybe this would be helpful to my audience.

How Do You Give Your Business a Check-up?

The first thing is I want you to do, is to ask yourself, what is your value proposition? What is it your customers are paying for. What do they expect when they give you money? What are they getting for their money? That’s your value proposition.

We’re trying to give a strong value proposition. I know I personally want to give my customers more than what they’re paying for, so when they write as a check or they pay as they go “wow, we got something of tremendous value”. And I own high-end companies so it’s hard for me to do that, but I’m always trying to add more value to it.

I was looking at the start-up that I have, and I was really struggling with what we were giving our customers. Could we make a promise that we could deliver on this?

Most of my companies are service companies and I felt like we were really falling short on the value proposition. Because if you’ve listened to me, I’m really huge on the “What if?” The genesis of my businesses needs to be an audacious “what if” and for this start-up, it was a very audacious “what if”. But the more I looked at it, I felt like we couldn’t deliver on that.

So I have a meeting this Friday, with my partners on a Zoom call, because they’re all located in different parts of the world, and I want to shore up our value proposition. I know we have an audacious “what if”, but I’m concerned we can’t deliver on it. Without it, I don’t think we have a strong and a value proposition that I would bet my life on for my customers. If you do business with my companies, I want to be able to make a big promise to you and I want to absolutely be able to bet my life I can. And if I’m not sure if we can, I won’t go forward with it, until I’m absolutely sure of that.

So I want to ask you, what do customers get when they do business with your company? When they buy your product, what do they get? Is it equal to what they’re paying? Hopefully more.

I have some very expensive cars, but I had to tell you, I feel like I underpaid. Yeah, I really do. I have a Mercedes SUV, and I think it’s worth $30k more than when I paid based on other cars and it’s the high-end Mercedes, but I would pay $30k more.

I have a BMW M4. I’ve driven $130k convertibles. My M4 is like $94k. I feel like I underpaid because Mercedes and BMW have a tremendous value proposition and I want that for the companies I have.

So again, we’re just giving your company a check-up. The first thing we’re saying is, “Do you have a strong value proposition, what do customers get for the money they give you?” That’s it, I just simplified it.

 

What Is Your Unique Selling Proposition?

What is it that you offer that your competitors don’t? If you’re just in shark-infested water and you’re no different than anybody else except you’re cheaper or you think you’re different, you need to have a true unique selling proposition.

I’ve shared this before, I’m going to describe three pizza places with unique selling propositions. All three are extraordinarily wealthy companies because of this and it’s amazing the one that I would never think is like crazy wealthy owns a sports team.

Pizza place number one is the largest. They sell more pizza than anybody in the United States. They do it in-house and now they offer delivery, but they were known for being a restaurant and that’s Pizza Hut.

The second his Domino’s Pizza. What’s their unique selling proposition? It was delivery and they started that based on a hot pizza in 30 minutes or less. That was their unique selling proposition.

The third one that I’m shocked how well it does is Little Caesars. What was there a unique selling proposition? Two pizzas for the price one, but you gotta come pick it up. The person was the Detroit Tigers baseball team owns Little Caesar’s.

You gotta decide as you’re reviewing your company, why do people buy from us? What do they get? What makes us unique? What makes us stand out from our competition that’s our unique selling proposition?

If you’re struggling with these and you’re really looking for a branding position I’m going to give you the secret to creating a branding position and it may tie up your value proposition and your unique selling proposition. So if you’re kind of fuzzy on these two, ask yourself what one problem if we could make it and deliver on it, people would chase us down for our business.

Let’s go back to the other examples.

If you can get me a hot pizza under 30 minutes delivered, I’m in. That’s a strong value proposition. That’s a very unique selling proposition, at the time. And again, we have a little Caesars. What’s their big one? “We give you two pieces for the price of one. That’s a strong one promise that’ll make people chase us down for our business.”

So if you’re looking to create a unique position in the marketplace and you don’t have one right now, and you’re struggling, it’s probably because you don’t have a strong one promise.

What if we could create an electric car that could be fast and super good-looking. Enter Tesla. Zero-to-sixty in three-something seconds and they have a decent price point in line with like a BMW or Mercedes.

What we’re trying to do is give your business a check-up and during these times, people are wondering why their businesses struggling. Coming out of this, you’re going to absolutely have to have a strong value proposition for people. You absolutely always need to have a unique selling proposition. What makes you different from your competition? You need to have a strong branding position. How are you marketing your company? What’s the one thing that customers think about when they think of your company? I want it always to be the one promise that if I could deliver on it, they chase me down for our business. That’s always been the branding position of any of my companies.