One thing I’ve been thinking a lot about lately is HOW we want to win.
It seems obvious that if you’re going to start a great food company, then you should make great food.
The conversation is probably supposed to go like this:
Q: “Hey Eric, what makes your kolache business special?”
A: “Well well! Let me tell you! We make the best dough! It’s hand rolled with the finest, stone-milled, organic flour. That is from wheat from my family vineyard in the French countryside. We water it only with runoff from ancient glaciers - because that water was frozen without modern day air pollutants contaminating its purity. Our spices are exclusively hand-picked by virgins who bathe in organic milk. Our pork products are from pigs that are fed beer and given daily massages, in the traditional Japanese Kobe beef tradition.”
“Make great food” is the obvious dimension to try to execute on in order to win. Of course!
This isn’t unlike any other business: Make the best: cars, TVs, accounting software, smoothies. Give the best: massages, manicures.
Many small businesses are trying to win by having the best PRODUCT in their category.
But, in addition to being:
1. the most obvious dimension for competition,
I’m increasingly coming to believe this is:
2. a boring dimension
3. the most difficult dimension
Why?
Blue Bottle is better coffee by almost any dimension than Dunkin Donuts, but Dunkin sold $800 million in coffee last year
McDonald’s surely doesn’t have the best… anything? Yet even single stores are probably outperforming your favorite local burger joint
Godaddy isn’t the best domain registrar, but they’re probably the most well known
Cutco doesn’t have the best knives, but they have a fantastic sales organization
Marriott doesn’t have the best hotels - most major metros have a better (and maybe even cheaper) boutique experience
Dell didn’t win on having the best computers; they just had the the best supply chain optimization
Go down the list of all your national or international brands of any category, then ask yourself how many of those are best in breed for their *product*? Probably not many.
For the most part they are winning on:
better marketers, or
better operations, or
faster delivery, or
better customer service, or
more points of distribution,
or more efficient processes, etc.
Obvious disclaimers to pre-empt haters:
Yes, you CAN win by making the best thing. Alinea does it, for example. French Laundry. Il Bulli. Noma. But there are a LOT of people competing for best food, and not a lot of people competing for “‘just-in-time-delivery’ as a process innovation to create a competitive advantage”
Even if you CAN win on being the best food, it doesn’t scale. That is *ART*, not commerce. That is a valid and valuable pursuit, but a different one.
I facetiously (and click-baiteyly (yep, that’s a real word)) subtitled this post with “by making the worst food”. We don’t make bad food. In fact, our food is delicious. However, if we fail (and we are definitely always just 2 bad decisions away from that), I firmly believe it won’t be because of food quality or taste.
There is, of course, the clear exception that Popeyes Fried Chicken is both ubiquitous AND the best in breed. 😊 I will fight to defend the honor of my first and only true love, Popeyes.
I am aware that I have no process or consistency in how I emphasize words. I write these drafts and don’t proofread before I hit send. And there’s definitely no method to my madness.