How My $10M Brands Consistently Beat the Competition

I spent the last 7 months studying what makes the top brands in over 100 different industries impossible to compete with. I've also personally scaled 8 companies to 8 figures in some of the most competitive and commoditized industries you can imagine, so I've had a lot of personal experience with this too. And what I've found is that the difference between a brand that competes on price and a brand that sets the price comes down to 5 specific triggers. I call them authority triggers, and in this video, I'm gonna walk you through all 5 of them with dozens of real-world examples so you can copy, paste, and install these triggers in your business, frankly, even if you're in the most boring and commoditized industries imaginable. So let's get started with trigger number 1, which is a unique point of view. I mean actual hills that you're prepared to die on, the core contrarian beliefs that you can claim and your competitors just can't. Now, love 'em or hate 'em, you know what Elon Musk believes. He believes the world is dying. He believes Mars is our only hope. If you believe any of that, or even somewhat inspired by it, there's a decent chance that you're gonna follow Elon Musk and one or more of his companies. But here's the thing, it doesn't have to be these pie-in-the-sky, world-ending kind of beliefs. Dollar Shave Club launched a D2C brand on the single belief that razors are just too dang expensive. That one point of view built a company that sold to Procter Gamble for $1 billion. Now, if you're gonna deploy this authority trigger, this unique point of view concept, there's something that you need to know. You are going to have to be okay with haters because if you do this right, you will create haters. And I'll tell ya, that's when you know it's working. If your point of view doesn't make somebody disagree, if it doesn't make 'em Maybe it's even just a little bit angry. It's not really a point of view. It's just kind of a statement. Now, I say things all the time that people don't like. I say things like, "The more valuable you are to your business, the less valuable your business is." I say annual planning is dumb. These are all things I believe, by the way, but they're not all things that make me popular with everyone in the business space. They make me popular with the right people, the people I want to work with, and that's all that matters. But a point of view only creates attention, and attention is important, but attention without a path forward is just noise, and that's where trigger number 2 comes in. The second authority trigger is all about having a clear, named, step-by-step plan that takes people from where they are to where they truly want to be. Now, religions and other mass movements have understood this forever. The Bible has the Ten Commandments, Islam has the Five Pillars, Alcoholics Anonymous has its 12 steps. Now, these aren't just belief systems, these are actual plans. They tell you exactly where you are and exactly what you need to do next. But some of the biggest brands in the world, they understand this and they do this as well. Let's go back to Dave Ramsey. This guy's the king of personal finance and he has his 7 Baby Steps. This is the single most recognizable personal finance framework in America. The interesting thing is, is that now the Baby Steps have gone into The Total Money Makeover book, which has sold almost 10 million copies. I mean, when somebody calls into his radio show and says, "Hey Dave, I've got $40,000 in credit card debt and I don't know what to do," he doesn't give them a custom answer. He says, "Well, what Baby Step are you on?" The plan is the product. Now, think about this for your business. If you're a marketing agency, stop just saying, "We do digital marketing," or whatever, what everybody's saying. It's undifferentiated. Instead, create a named 5-step process. Call it, I don't know, the Revenue Engine Builder, something like that. Now you don't sell marketing like everyone else, you install revenue engines. Your prospect can see exactly where they are in the process and where they're going. What you're doing when you give your customers a plan is you're not only giving them confidence that you know what you're doing, you're also giving them the language to start to sell your business and your brand for you. A step-by-step plan isn't just a sales tool. This is your word-of-mouth engine. When your customer has a named plan that they can explain in 60 seconds, they can literally recruit other people who need the same kind of help that they needed. The biggest mistake that people make here is just making the plan too dang complicated. We gotta keep this simple, and we gotta make it feel like a path and not just some brochure. But your competitors can build a plan too, so what makes your plan the one that they should follow? Well, that's where trigger number 3 comes in. The 3rd authority trigger is what's known as a unique mechanism, and this is the one that answers the question every prospect is asking, whether they say it out loud or not, which is, why should I choose you over every other option available to me? Now, in his book, Breakthrough Advertising, Eugene Schwartz described what the unique mechanism is and why it works like this. He said, "If your market is at the stage where they've heard all the claims in all their extremes, then mere repetition or exaggeration won't work any longer. What this market needs now is a new device, a new mechanism, a new way to make the old promise work." And that is the key. When everyone else is out there making the exact same promise, you need to give them a new reason to believe. You don't have to promise a new result or a new objective. You just need to give them a reason to believe that there's a new mechanism, a new way to get the thing that they've always wanted. Now, there are 3 types of unique mechanisms that you can consider when you're trying to brainstorm your own. The first type is the new discovery, and this is a genuinely new invention, a new patent, a new breakthrough. So for example, when Invisalign figured out how to straighten teeth without metal braces, that was a breakthrough. So I can actually have straight teeth and I don't have to have these metal bars on my face? Cool, I love it. That was new, that was novel, that was a new mechanism. Now if you have something truly new, a truly new discovery, great. But most of us don't. Most of us are working within a somewhat commoditized space, and if that's the case, the second type is one that you might wanna consider, and this is what I call the previously unspoken. A unique mechanism that's based on the previously unspoken, these are ideas and processes that likely everyone in your industry knows about, right? All the insiders know about, but nobody's talking about it publicly, so there's a really good chance that your customers don't know about it. But if you can be the first to talk about it to the outside world, then you get credit for it. Now, one of my favorite examples of this is Schlitz beer. So Schlitz went from being a tiny brand well outside the top 10 to a top 3 beer company in the States in a matter of years by advertising that their brand was brewed, wait for it, in filtered air, and it was stored in brown bottles, and it was cold filtered. Now, in reality, this is how all beer was brewed and stored. They were the first to claim it, and that's why they got credit for having a higher quality product, even though the process was standard across the industry. The third type of unique mechanism is the new definition. Now, this is where you give a new name to an old idea. My favorite example of this is the air fryer. Now, in case you weren't aware, an air fryer is literally just a small convection oven that sits on your countertop. This is nothing new. Convection ovens have been around for decades, but somebody made it slightly smaller and gave it a fancy new name, and now it's not a convection oven, it's a machine that uses air to fry food. That's genius. Everybody loves fried food, but we all worry about the health downsides. But what's unhealthy about air, right? Now here's the pitfall on this one. People think they need to have a genuine invention to have a unique mechanism. To have a differentiated position in the marketplace? You don't. The previously unspoken and the new definition paths are available right now to anyone with an imagination. You just have to look at what you're already doing and name it in a way that nobody else has. And by the way, thanks to AI, this creative process is easier than ever. So you've got a point of view, you've got a plan, and you've got a unique mechanism. But there's something even more primal that bonds people to a brand. Trigger 4: A common enemy. But I love, uh, Blair Warren, uh, he's an author and he wrote this book called The One Sentence Persuasion Course, uh, and in it he included this line: "People will do anything for those who encourage their dreams, justify their failures, allay their fears, confirm their suspicions, and help them throw rocks at their enemies." And that last one, throwing rocks at their enemies, that's this trigger. When your brand stands against something, customers don't just buy from you, they join you, they become bonded to you. You stop being a vendor and you start being an ally in a fight that they already care about. And the most iconic brands in the world, they understand this, they've always understood this. I mean, think about Apple. Apple built their entire brand on a common enemy. And the enemy, by the way, wasn't just IBM, it wasn't just PCs. It was anything that stole your individuality, anything that tried to make you the same as everyone else. Who wants a stylus? You have to get 'em and put 'em away and you lose 'em. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus. Another one is Liquid Death. Now, if you haven't heard of Liquid Death, it's a water company and their enemy is just boring corporate water. They sell water in a tall boy can that looks like a beer at music festivals and has an image of a melting skull on it. It's not exactly the kind of thing that makes you thirsty, but you understand who the enemy is. Now, here's where this gets interesting. The enemy doesn't have to be a competitor. In fact, the most powerful enemies are ideas, systems, institutions, status quos that your audience already resents. Now, for me, I'm against hustle culture. I'm against bankers and private equity firms telling business owners that they're not capable at running their business themselves without adult supervision. Trigger number 5: rites and rituals. If you can get your customers to do something, anything, to alter a habit, to perform an action, to signal publicly that they're a part of your brand, that's when you've built something that's almost impossible for your competitors to replicate. Tony Robbins, the famous motivational speaker, he does this when he has people walk across hot coals at his event. Let's be honest, That's weird. It's not normal that you would walk across hot coals. That is definitely breaking a habit of, I as a general rule don't walk across hot coals. He has me do it, okay, now I must be in. I must be a part of this. I've done something different. Dave Ramsey does this when he has people call into his radio show and literally scream, "Debt free!" When it's done like this, it's not just a testimonial, it is a ritual. It's a rite of passage. Now today at The Scalable Company, we do something a little bit different. What we do is we actually give all of our clients this challenge coin, and we encourage them. We say, "Hey, keep this with you at all times. You know, keep this in your pocket." And on one side of the coin it reads, "Failure is temporary." On the other side it reads, "Success is temporary." And our goal with this coin is to remind our clients that when things aren't going well, it's a temporary condition. And we're here to help. It's also there to remind them that when things are going great, they should probably stay humble because, well, frankly, success can be a temporary condition too, so don't let this go to your head. The other thing we tell, and this is where the ritual comes in play, is if they come across another business owner in their life who is struggling, they need to give them this coin. They need to say, "Hey, I want you to have this," and when they give them this coin, they need to pass along the message as well that, "Hey, I know things aren't great right now, but failure is temporary and you are not alone. If they do that, our promise is really simple. We say, look, if you give this coin to somebody else who really needs it, we'll ship you an old one. We'll ship you one to replace the coin that you gave away, and we'll give you another one so you can give that one away too. How do you get them to put a sticker on their laptop, wear a t-shirt, plant a flag, carry around a coin that you don't really need? Heck, get a tattoo. And you may not think that this applies to you because your business is boring, But it can, and it should. The key is that the customer performs an action outside of their normal habits or routine that creates a public or personal signal of belonging. The ultimate sign of a successful brand is that you'd be truly missed if you were gone. If you're not a top 3 brand, you are duking it out with dozens, hundreds, potentially thousands of other brands for 10, 20, maybe as much as 30% of the market, but that's it. Some quick examples, look at soft drinks. You got Coca-Cola, you got Pepsi, you got Dr Pepper. They've got over 90% of US market share. 3 brands, 90%. And if you're not one of the top 3 brands in your category and you're not a clear specialist, so if you're not kinda creating your own little category, niche category of its own, you're in what they call the ditch. And the ditch is not a place you wanna be. Too big to be a niche player, but you're too small to be a top 3 brand in your own category. That's the zone of the lowest profitability of any market. Even if there's some revenue, the profitability is almost nothing because you've been so commoditized. And this sadly is where most businesses between the $2 million and $20 million range are living right now. They're right down there in the ditch. And the authority triggers, this is how you climb out. The implementation of these 5 authority triggers, this is your playbook. For how you decommoditize, how you become a top 3 brand, and to show you what it looks like when everything comes together, I wanna go back to Buc-ee's, okay? Remember Buc-ee's? Buc-ee's is a gas station. Gas stations are possibly the most boring and most commoditized businesses on earth. Every gas station sells the same gas, they've got the same snacks, if you're lucky they may even let you use your bathroom, but that's about it. But Buc-ee's has a point of view. A gas station should be a destination Not a pit stop. And they have a common enemy, every crappy, dirty, understaffed, gross road trip gas station that you've ever pulled into. And they have rites and rituals. I mean, people will plan their road trips around stopping at Buc-ee's. They take photos with the beaver mascot. That's what stacking these triggers looks like in action. Even in the most boring industry imaginable, this stuff still works. You do not need to have all 5 triggers. You can get it done with just one. Now if you can do two, you're almost certainly gonna dominate less competitive categories. If you can get three, you'll almost certainly dominate your category. Four, you're probably gonna start a cult whether you like it or not. And if you manage to do all five, you're gonna own the world. So the next step is to figure out how customers actually happen, how they actually get to you, because having a great brand doesn't matter if nobody knows you exist, and if even when they find out you exist, you don't know how to convert them when you have them. So I made a video that walks you through how to build your growth engine step by step so that you can turn this differentiated brand into an actual customer-getting conversion machine. I'm gonna link to that somewhere around here. Finally, if you got value from this, please subscribe. I put out videos like this every week, and I don't want you to miss the next one. With that said, I'll see you there. I'll see you in the next one.