A speaker shares how to borrow ideas and business models from unrelated industries to improve your own workflows. Instead of copying competitors, look at how other fields handle onboarding and customer engagement to find fresh approaches.
Ingredients. And let's see if this all went live. I'm going to repeat that in case it didn't. Today I'm going live to talk about borrowing ingredients for your business. And ingredients, I mean content, ideas, models, pricing structure. Pretty much anything in your business has already been done before, thousands of times over by hundreds of different industries. And you don't need to reinvent the wheel. I mean, there's a place to get a little bit creative. But we can do a lot when we start from a foundation of borrowing, which, you know, if you've read the book Steal like an Artist, it's that kind of idea building on the shoulders of other people in different industries that you can apply lessons from, you know, what worked in H Vac, apply it to consulting and reap the rewards. Now I'm just introducing this concept today because I'm going to start producing a series of live videos. You're going to see me more and more in your feed. Hello. Talking about these different pieces of the, the fundamental pieces of what I think we need to put into our process. And if I cut out here in a moment, it's because my dogs might start barking when the mail arrives. But the main point I want to talk about today is borrowing. Basically that when we are running a business, it is our job to constantly improve it. And when I'm talking about it, I'm referring to the operations, the way we conduct our business, from our onboarding to our fulfillment to our off boarding to our new nurturing and sales processes. Our job is to constantly be making that better. And if you are a new business, your job is to just get it right for the first time. When I started my business, I talk a lot about how I started in a very lean way. You know, I had no money, no connections, no experience. I was just trying to get myself off the ground. And the way I did, I called my business, I'm not sure if you're aware, I called it to my friends, my MBA business. I was going to teach myself an MBA in entrepreneurship by figuring it out, by doing it. And the way I have been teaching myself along this journey and the way I've been gathering the knowledge I need to work with clients is by borrowing, reading a book about a totally random industry and figuring out what lessons, what core incentives, what human behavior could be applied in another industry works the same way in workflows. If you see in the, you know, the MLM or the direct sales industry, the way that those individual direct sellers are able to rally a crowd of people to buy their product, even though, and they're well aware their product could be purchased at many times at Walmart. But people are buying it for a premium from an individual direct seller because they've built this personal brand. And how are those direct sellers building that brand? It's by doing lives like this. It's by doing just kind of guerrilla marketing. And there are lessons that we in more traditional businesses can learn from that. And that's the whole idea of borrowing. It's being open to other industries and finding lessons that you can translate, process the beauty of it, onboarding, offboarding, whatever it is. It's more or less the same in every industry. Whether you are selling high tech medical equipment or you're doing agricultural products, or you're a hairstylist. Now granted, the hairstylists in some of these instances are very affected in different ways by the current crisis. But moving forward, when we get back to our new normal, there are things that we can be doing that are seem ingenious to our industry. But it's just because they were applied very. They were proven and applied in another industry and then we were then applying it to our space. So onboarding, processing, for example, a hairdresser might not have it, but let's do more example like a lawn care business. So if you are in lawn care, that business tends to be a little bit more transactional. But what if you were the premium lawn care provider and you started giving welcome gifts and seasonal, you know, mug for Christmas, thank you for letting us a free plant, whatever. That would be different. Little touch points that are something that's more traditional in the more professional services space and doing it in lawn care. All of a sudden you found something that makes you stand out by applying something that's working very well in another industry and applying it to your own. So I just kind of give you a roundabout definition here. An example of borrowing, taking inspiration. I will give a few kind of pointers around this and how I've been approaching it. Number one, don't borrow from competitors. Don't even borrow from your industry. I find that it's very unhelpful for me personally to follow a lot of people in the virtual assistant space, in the system setup space, even in the process consulting space. I pretty much put my head in the sand and try not to follow any competitors. There's a few people I follow because they're inspirational in some way or another. But anyone that does something very similar to me, I do my best to check out because they borrowing from competitors becomes it can introduce conflict. It can introduce that scarcity mentality and it doesn't actually innovate because you're just riffing off of other people. You're just joining the wave of a trend that's already happening versus starting a new trend which is what happens when you borrow from other industries. So that's tip number two. Find random industries that have something in common with you whether it's the structure. You said I used lawn care because it's a recurring business. Lawn care could probably practice copy some practices from bookkeeping. Bookkeeping is another recurring service. Are there lessons that the two could share? Probably. Bookkeepers tend to do a lot of education. How many lawn care companies do you know that are including education? All right, I'm about to have some barking start here so I'll stop it there. But that is the lesson on borrowing from competitors. You'll see more in the Facebook group and some videos coming up. Thanks so much for watching.
