Ray DeckAcclaimed advisor to hundreds of founders and builders. Investor, teacher, founder, advisor

Tall vs Wide Businesses #scaling #strategy #entrepreneurship #startups

Name: Tall vs Wide Businesses #scaling #strategy #entrepreneurship #startups
Uploaded: 2024-08-25T13:01:01+00:00
Duration: 56 s
Channel: Ray Deck
Description: In this short monologue, the speaker distinguishes two archetypal business models. A "tall" business serves a narrow, specialized customer set with…

25 Aug 2024 · 1 min

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In this short monologue, the speaker distinguishes two archetypal business models. A "tall" business serves a narrow, specialized customer set with highly customized or bespoke offerings, often generating high margins. A "wide" business delivers a standardized, productized service that can be sold to many customers, emphasizing consistency and scalability. The speaker observes that most companies fall in between—trying to avoid a narrow client base while lacking standardized processes—resulting in sub‑optimal profitability. The core recommendation is that firms should deliberately commit to either the tall or the wide path to maximize profits.

Chapters

Are you a tall business or a wide business? I find that tall businesses are ones that serve a narrower set of customers and provide a great deal of value to those customers through something that is either bespoke or relatively specialized. And this is often where a lot of profits can be found. And then there's a second category of business, what I would call a wide business, where they are providing a certain base level of services that can be applied to a whole lot of different businesses. What you're really providing there is consistency of that experience. And that's where like productization comes into play to say, we're going to just do the same thing for a whole bunch of folks. But what I have found is that most businesses are neither tall nor wide. They are afraid of not having a wide enough client base, so they don't do nearly as much, but they are providing too much or don't really have their processes standardized, which means they can't really go very wide. Committing to one path or the other is, in my experience, the way to drive maximum profits.