What is Your Unfair Advantage?

Business brain, episode 569 for Wednesday, July 31st. Uncommon Instrument Awareness Day 2024. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take an idea or three, we dissect it, we analyze it, we talk about it, we use it to tune our business brains each and every episode here on Uncommon Instrument Awareness Day in Durham, New Hampshire. I am Dave Hamilton.

I'm out here in California. I'm Shannon Jean. I know you play an uncommon instrument, Dave. Some sort of board, washboard kind of thing.

I do have a washboard. I don't. But no one knows. No, you've never seen me play the washboard. I play.

Looks like that.

Yeah, I play a. It's a cajon, which is a Spanish for box, but box.

That's it.

You've seen a lot of cajones that people sit on. You know, that's the most common iteration of a cajon. The one I play is a tabletop cajon. And it. Well, it was built to be a tabletop cajon.

And you hold it. Right.

But I. When I saw it online years ago, I was like, well, wait. Which all it means is it's thinner, right? And I saw it and I was like, wait a minute. Like, if we put pegs on that, like, guitar strap pegs, then I could wear it. And I just casually mentioned this to my wife once, and then a month and a half later for my birthday, it showed up. And now, like, I'm all over their website and stuff with.

That's cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the. With the pitch slap. So it's. Yeah, yeah. So.

What a trip. Oh, yeah. There it is. That's it. I was thinking of some kind of board. That's awesome.

I mean, it is kind of a board. Yeah.

Uncommon. Uncommon instrument.

It is an uncommon instrument for today.

You're.

You're right. I have a question, Shannon, for you, about something also uncommon that you mentioned to me once called Inland Marine Insurance. What is that?

I love that. I get excited about it.

Okay.

It's, you know, it's hard to get excited about insurance. But, you know, if you ship stuff, products, either into you or out to your clients. Clients out to your customers, you got to have some insurance involved. Right. You don't want these orders whether you're shipping from overseas, if you're shipping containers from. From, you know, China or Asia, and then they're coming into your warehouse and you're shipping out individual orders. All when it's out of your hands, you have to protect it. And Inland Marine Insurance is A policy or often a rider that you can add to your normal business insurance policy that, that protects that stuff as it's traveling so in between your supplier and you and often even more important between your warehouse or your. If you have a third party logistics, a three pl company shipping your orders, your inland marine insurance can cover you at that as well. Rather than buying insurance from like the carriers like UPS or FedEx or USPS, which is very expensive, an inland marine policy is inexpensive and covers you. It's great. And it's, it's for shipping.

So it's, it's. Even though it has the word marine in it because it's inland marine. It's, it's covering you when it's over land as opposed to over water.

Yeah. Well, it'll cover it over water too.

Okay.

If you're, if just not large ocean or whatever. Yeah, yeah, got it. There's a, there's a, all these policies have nuance. So you want to talk to your insurance carrier and just say, hey, look, I need coverage for this. This is what I'm looking for. And it's just a big, most people, many, many businesses don't even know it exists. And it's a simple little thing. Again, often just a writer that you add to your insurance policy.

Yeah.

That covers you. And you never have to buy insurance again for anything you ship anything. And if you're shipping massive, I mean, you know, thousands of products, it really adds up if you're trying to cover those individually. So plus another important difference is you have a relationship with that insurance company that's different than if you're going to call UPS or FedEx and file a claim because it didn't. Something broke or the package got lost. Right. So FedEx, UPS, they give you some minimum insurance. I think it's like $100. So you can always quickly file that product didn't show up or show up damage. I want my hundred bucks. But if they're higher dollar items, which is usually the case, your inland marine carrier, you have a rep or an agent, they know you got it and it's just much easier to deal with and much easier to get your claims processed when you have a problem. So it's great. I love it. I highly recommend it for anybody that's shipping stuff all over the country or all over the world. Yeah, that's cool.

Yeah, cool.

But that's not what I really want to talk about today.

What's that, Shannon?

What I really want to talk about is this concept of your. For your business. What is your unfair advantage, Right?

Oh, yeah.

What. What do you have that other companies don't have?

Your unfair competitive advantage. This is a concept we've mentioned a few times over the years, but we've never really dug into it. Yeah.

Yeah. And so I think it's. It's crucial to understand what it is. If you don't have one, try to figure out what it is. I think most companies do have one, but it's not things like, oh, we give the best service, whatever our customer, our products are best price. That's. That's not it.

No. You can have an advantage that unfair. The. I love the term unfair competitive advantage because it gets people's attention and, you know, raises the hackles sometimes. But it's. It's mo. It's not unfair in that you've created it to be unfair. It's. No, it's that it is just something that is. That you have or your company has or you figured out or you figured out. Right. But that. That you have that other people just don't have and can't easily develop. Like I've said, and this is maybe a weak example, but with what we do with Backbeat Media, our unfair competitive advantage is that the CEO of the company has been podcasting and publishing on the web for, you know, well, podcasting for 20 years and publishing on the web for almost 30. That creates. That's difficult for someone else to just step in and do exactly the same thing that we do. They can't say that they have what we have. Right. So that's correct. That's the kind of thing that you want to start thinking about with your business, like, what is it that we have or that we've developed that would be very difficult for someone else to replicate?

Right. Well, I'll give you a simple example and then a complex example. So when I was in college, some of my roommates, guys were really into trucks and cars and working on them and doing stuff. So I said, hey, let's go buy some cars and trucks and sell them and. And make some money.

Sure.

And so in. When I was in college, there was a thing, like a little magazine newspaper thing called the Easy Ad. Some places have them, like Penny Savers, like that.

Yeah. The place where you can go find used cars or sell used cars or used whatever. Right.

Yeah, yeah. And every Thursday this would come out, and we'd drive around town trying to find locations where they dropped them off and all this kind of stuff. And we was always scrambled. Like, wait, it's not here. It's not there. So one day I just called them and I said, hey guys, what time do you drop them off? They said, oh, it's kind of before, you know, between one and three and this is kind of the direction. I was like, well, that I don't know how. But then they said something very important. The representative said, well, but we drop them at 10am in the lobby every Thursday. Our rack is the first rack we drop and it's 10:00am Oh, I said, I hung up and I said thank you.

That's what I need to know. Yeah.

Guess where I was at 10am next Thursday? I was in their lobby. And so by the time we, we did this for a couple years before most anyone else got that, we had already found the deals, called the people, drove there, give them the, gave them the cash and bought, you know what we thought was a good deal at that time.

Yep.

And it was great. And that, that's a, that was our unfair advantage.

But that's something somebody else could have easily replicated. They could have stood in the lobby with you.

Like, yeah, most, I would say these unfair advantages, you can replicate them. And like there's a, there's a tie in here with this topic that I, I want to mention too but so let see if I can find it. There is a location is often an unfair advantage.

Okay. Yep.

And not just the location of you your location, but many times the location of pro of the product. And there's a very interesting case. There's a book publisher called John Wiley and Sons.

Yes.

They sell textbooks and it turns out that the price they charge in the US Is exponentially higher than the price they charge in other countries. Asia, for example. And this guy, let me find this, this guy's name. His name is. I'm going to butcher it. I think Supap Kirtsing is, he was from Thailand. He was studying here and he, he realized, man, these books are like a hundred dollars here and $20 in Thailand. So he had his, of course, like any aspiring entrepreneur would do, which I love, he had his family buy up all the, the Wiley textbooks that he could in Thailand, send them here to the US and he sold them and he started a business and he made a ton of money. And then he got sued.

And then he got sued. I was just going to say in looking for Su Pop, Kurt Sang's name and relating it to John Wiley so that I could get the spelling right for the show notes, the first thing I found is Kurt Sang versus John Wiley and Sons, Inc.

But the Good news is he won. They took it all the way to the Supreme Court. And there's a legal doctrine called the doctrine of first sale, which is another thing that I just love because effectively it means that once you own a product, as long as you're not encroaching on any kind of trademark or copyright, but. And it's an authentic product, not a counterfeit. Once you own a product, you can do whatever you want with. Doesn't matter if it's a book, a handbag, a dvd, a refrigerator, or a car. And it doesn't matter if you bought one or five thousand, you own it. The company that created it cannot tell you what to do with it. They may try. Of course, if you're selling, you know, and I've sold a lot on marketplaces, ebay and Amazon, Poshmark, all those things. And companies, they do not like resellers that go and sell the reseller product on these secondary markets.

Yeah. Because it dilutes the value of, of what they can do. They, and it, it eliminates their control.

Yeah, that's right. They don't have control. So they will try to file things to get you removed from these platforms. And one of the easiest ways they do is people go and cut and pa. Copy and paste the text from the designer, whoever the, the manufacturer's website, and they put it in their listing.

Right.

Because they say, oh, I want to list all the details. That's an easy way to get your listing taken down. So you have to write your own descriptions and your, all your data points. And it's important to, nowadays especially to state that you're not affiliated with the company that manufactures.

That's fair.

Yeah. Because they, that's another thing they try to put it in. But you know, this unfair advantage thing, it's, it's all around us. Who, you know.

Right.

What I mean, I, I live in California. I'm right near Apple. And for years I bought stuff from Apple employees, you know, because Apple employees would get, they'd be blowing out. I mean, I still kick myself to this day because I was buying like those 20th anniversary Macs.

Yeah.

And they were just, you know, they were like 800. They were blowing them out to employees for nothing. And I did not save one. I don't have one in my, in my thing. And I, and now I go look, and they're like 3, 500 bucks. And I, and I don't, I want it, but I don't need it. So, but, but, so, so my location was an unfair advantage. My relationships with people were an unfair advantage. 1800. That's not bad, but yeah. So think about your business. What. What do you have that others don't? You know, do you have bigger trucks that can deliver more stuff at once? Is your. Does your product sound better than everybody else's because you've got a patent on some kind of sound thing like Sonos or something? I mean, all these things, you get them locked. Apple's unfair advantage, as they get you, you know, a super simple product that works most of the time, but they get you locked into their ecosystem as well.

Right, totally.

And. And you're not going to leave and you get, you know, mad at the guy who messes up your group chat with the green bubble.

That's right.

Yeah. So anyway, I think the unfair advantage is an interesting topic. I think that all of us, you could look at almost every business that's thriving and they have. Look at Nvidia. Their unfair advantage is that they started planning five years ago, whatever, 10 years ago to figure this chip thing out, and now they have it and everybody else is behind.

Right. Interesting. Yeah. No, every business, you probably have one with your business. Just start thinking about what that is and, you know, even tell ChatGPT or email us we might be better at this than chatgpt, but just email us feedbackusbrain show and tell us about your business. We'll have some questions for you that might really help with the whole unfair advantage. I remember when this. I started talking to this company called Osiris Media that did and still does produces podcasts primarily towards live music fans. Well, one of their co founders is a guy named Tom Marshall who is and always has been the primary lyricist for the band Phish. And so I told them, they're like, well, you know, we're not sure if our shows are marketable. I'm like, well, you have Tom. He's your unfair advantage. Like, no one, they're like, there's other people doing shows about, like, live music and jam bands. I'm like, right. But they don't have you. Like, you're it, you know, and. And could somebody else have created this? Yes. Did they? No. So there you go. It's you and it. Sometimes it's hard for us to see what our own. It's obvious to us that, you know, the things that we can do. Stop and think. Can. Can other people do these exact same things? And if not, why? And if so, why Start asking those questions. And we're happy to. To kind of do that with you. So, you know, Feedback businessgreen Show and.

You know, lately, like, and then lean.

Into that in your marketing.

Yes.

Yes.

When I was young and working with a bunch of young guys right out of college, we. Our youth was our unfair advantage.

Sure.

People were like, oh, we want to help out you young guys and your business and this kind of thing. And now that I'm old and have gray hair, my unfair advantage is my experience and that I get to talk and tell my story in reverse, which makes me look much smarter than I really am.

Smarter. That's right.

Yeah. Of course. And so all of us have this built in. It's just recognizing it and.

And find it and then figure out how to market either it or you and your business. Like, whatever the. The permutation is figuring that out. And just so people know, like, we have a thing that other people don't have, you might want to work with us instead and leave it up to them. That's it. Yeah.

I love it. That's great. Yeah. Feedback at BusinessBrain Show. Send us a message. Tell us what your unfair advantage is, or if you don't think you have one, tell us about your business and we'll try to help you point it out.

Absolutely. Feedbackusbrain Show. I'll say it one more time, folks. Thank you for hanging out with us. Thanks for all your feedback. Thanks for sharing the show with a friend. Keep living that charm life and we'll see you on Friday.