Crazy innovations become future best practices. So what do you want your marketing goals to be set be based on?

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from Mom and Pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.

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Dave Young:

I’m Dave Young with Stephen Semple, and he caught me off guard because we’re not going to talk about a brand today. Stephen’s going to go on a rant about best practices and leadership, and it startled me so much, that tripped me up. I love your rants, so best practices versus leadership. Yeah. Ready, set, go.

Stephen Semple:

Well, this is one of the things that drives me really quite crazy because we’ll introduce an idea, an innovative new idea to a customer, and the first thing they’ll want to sit there and say is, well, has anybody else done this? And I’ll say, well, this coffee company did it. Well, yeah, but we’re not a coffee company. Has anybody else done it in the coffee industry? And I’ll sit there and say to them, we really like following best practices. Right? Well, guess what? The best practices of today were innovative brand new ideas that shocked the industry 20 years ago.

Dave Young:

Exactly.

Stephen Semple:

And I feel like this idea of best practices is so much limiting innovation in industry today. We all get together as these industry groups. One person stands up there and talks about, and usually it’s not even the person who created the best practice, it’s some consultant who studied the best practice, who now you should spend all sorts of money with because they’re going to teach you this best practice and lock you into a path of being a follower. The other thing is the leader in the industry who created these best practices, you are never going to beat them at their game. You’re never going to beat them at the game they quite frankly invented. They invented it. You are David going in trying to beat Goliath, using his weapons and his sword. Never going to happen.

Dave Young:

So I’m going to say this and it’s not as pushback, but there are places where best practices are good to have, right? When your automaker has engineered and designed a car and said, these are the best practices for maintenance of this vehicle, you should follow those best practices. You shouldn’t say, I’m going to be a maverick and I’m never going to change the oil. Heart surgery, if this is the best practice for heart surgery, you should probably hope that you have a surgeon that’s willing to follow the best practices. But there is a surgeon out there somewhere that broke new ground and developed those best practices. There’s also a surgeon out there that broke new ground and his patient died on the table.

And best practices, like you say, what it ends up being is just copycats. When you talk about marketing and advertising, when people say, well, best practices for the dental industry is this. That’s just because somebody did a really good job one time and everybody started copying them.

Stephen Semple:

The other problem is, that also feeds into this, is measuring versus not measuring. So here’s the best example I can give. I can measure the impact of overstocked inventory. I got 10 pairs of socks left, which has driven companies to having no inventory. But what they can’t measure is loss sales due to not having it on the shelf. That’s not measurable. And the reason why I say that as an innovative idea is, one of the innovations that Walmart brought was focusing on that because Sam Walton said, you can’t sell what’s not on the shelf.

So one of the other problems is if you wanted best practices is safe and comfortable because it’s measurable. A whole pile of people are doing it and they’ve measured the result. Great. Innovation is unknown because you can’t measure it until you do it. Now the question is, that you have to ask yourself is, do you want to be a leader? And the reason why I bring this up is we get customers come to us with being, I want to be innovative. I want to be a leader. I want to do marketing that’s different. I want to stand out, I want to do all those things. And then we bring them something and go, well, I’m a plumber. Is there any other plumbers who’ve done this? Because best practices in our industry. And it’s like, dude, do you want to be a leader or not?

And if you don’t want to be fine. However, it always means you will be a follower and you will not be number one in your space in your industry. That thought process is holding you back.

Now here’s the interesting thing. Do we want to do complete experimentation that’s never been done before? That can be a little bit uncomfortable as well.

Dave Young:

Sure.

Stephen Semple:

What we try to do, and you’ve referred to it a few times, and part of the reason why I wanted to talk about this is, you’ve referred about business topology a number of times, referred to it. I don’t think people understand what that is, but business topology is, and a great example, probably one of the best ones we’ve done in a podcast, was Harry’s recently. Where the business topology of Harry’s was very similar to the business topology of Warby Parker. And so this is the reason why they knew it would work.

Dave Young:

Problem topology, the business problem topology.

Stephen Semple:

The business problem topology was the same, the business was facing the same problems, so therefore the same solution would work. Or we’ll see something where it’s a similar type of buying process, it’s a high-end buying. So for example, the work I do with my private jet company, a lot of the inspiration has come from selling high-end jewelry, same problems. It’s a luxury product, same problems. This type of messaging worked over there. This type of messaging is going to work here. We did this with diamonds, we did this with high-end watches. You know what? Jet just has a couple extra zeros to the end of it. Same problem. And so business topology works really well to create innovation, worked over there, similar problems. This solution, we can bring it over here. It then gets defeated by best practices where they go. But there’s no other jet companies doing that.

Dave Young:

If you looked at what are the best practices of problems that match the topology of my problems, you become a leader in your category versus what are the best practices of businesses in my category?

Stephen Semple:

Yes.

Dave Young:

Now you’re the same as everyone in your category.

Stephen Semple:

Yes, and then the best practice thing even gets distilled down even further where people will say things like, yeah, but that would work on the West Coast. I’m on the East Coast. And the funny thing is, human beings are far more similar than they are different. Yes, we have little nuances that are different, but our core desires and what-not are much closer. So if you want to use business topology as a process, and look, this entire podcast is business topology.

Dave Young:

Absolutely.

Stephen Semple:

Every episode is, here’s the business topology, here’s the lessons that learned. Every episode is about look outside to other businesses, other geographies, other things. Every one of these episodes is business topology.

Dave Young:

And can you apply the same solutions that they used with this particular set of issues to your business?

Stephen Semple:

Correct.

Dave Young:

That’s the lesson that we want people to take.

Stephen Semple:

Correct. But that also means you’ve got to abandon the idea of best practices if you’re going to do business topology. Because what you’re doing is saying, I want to be an innovator. I want to change the business.

I was having a conversation with a brand new prospect and he was sharing his angst about how the business should be done this way. He’s a builder in residential building, and he came from the commercial side. And he said, well, these things should be done here. I said, well, why don’t you want to do that? Well, no one does that. I was like, well, why don’t they do it? Well, they don’t do it for these sets of reasons. I said, okay, so if we did these things, if we made these things happen, you could do… Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, why aren’t we doing that? And he’s like, well, it’s not been done before. And I said, right, and that makes it powerful. Do you not believe that people would want that? And he’s like, yeah, they probably would. Let’s do that then. But immediately he was like, but no one’s doing that, so eliminated the idea. Even though he knew in his heart it was superior.

So that’s the reason why I wanted to talk about that. But I also wanted to introduce this whole idea because you’ve referred to it a few times, and at its core, this is what this podcast is about, is this concept of business topology. Because what it allows you to do is take an idea that you know at its core has worked. Now maybe it needs a little modification. So using your heart surgeon example is the heart surgeon has probably looked at something that has been done elsewhere and said, that’s been done over here, with these couple of tweaks, this would probably work, right?

It’s not just this crazy brand new idea that’s come completely out of left field. It has a grounding in it that has been used in other areas, and then we were just picking it up and setting it over here and doing something in a slightly different way.

Dave Young:

Stay tuned, we’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.

[Empire Builders Ad]

Dave Young:

When you relate it to a business owner, so especially in fields like plumbing or electrical, that are highly regulated, you have electrical codes and plumbing codes that you have to adhere to. You don’t want to hire a plumber that’s a maverick, renegade, innovative leader in how to do plumbing.

Stephen Semple:

Correct.

Dave Young:

But you will hire a plumber who is doing something to make you remember him in a way that’s different than all the other plumbers have ever done. So we’re talking about marketing innovation and marketing leadership. And we would never suggest to a plumber that no, let’s try square pipes instead of round pipes. That’s not what we’re talking about.

Stephen Semple:

No, but what we are talking about, using your plumbing example, one of the best practices in plumbing is you want to have your board full for three days. That’s the best practices. They all strive for that. They’re all being taught that. Have your board full for three days. That’s best practices. So in other words, if a phone call, if somebody calls in with a backed up toilet, you should not be able to get to them for four days. That’s best practices. Now what we have is plumbers who are killing it, who have purposely, purposely got two trucks every day, not filled, not booked to take emergency calls. Because then they can also charge a premium for those calls. We charge a premium for emergency calls, but guess what? Most days at the end of the day, those two trucks are filled. We can also advertise. We have two trucks not committed. Give us a call.

Dave Young:

If you call the one that’s got their board full for three days, it’s like, okay, good for them, they’ve got their board full for three days. When they tell you that it’s going to be day four that they can come fix your problem, now you’re just looking for a different plumber that isn’t following the best practice of having his board full for three days and you’ll find one.

Stephen Semple:

And here’s what’s even crazier. Those same people who’ve got their board full for four days run Google AdWords on emergency plumbing services. Because what they know is, well, that’s really effective for getting telephone calls and then let’s just piss the consumer off. Anyway, that’s a completely different rant.

But my point is, and I guess I’m on this rant because I’ve been working with a lot of plumbers lately who is like, whoa, our board needs to be full. It’s like, no, no. You should actually have some excess capacity available to help people who’ve got emergency calls. Because you know what? And then because that person will just go to the next, they’ll just keep calling until they find somebody. That’s what’s going to happen. And we can’t change that behavior. So why not serve them?

Dave Young:

When you start thinking about the lifetime value of a customer, and this is their first exposure to you, right? They called, they have an emergency and you built in excess capacity so you’re able to deal with it. Guess who’s now their favorite plumber and who they’re likely to call the first time next time?

Stephen Semple:

It’s not. Ignore best practices, follow best practices, go to your industry things, but recognize you also have got to be careful in, don’t have that as being the limiter that prevents you from doing other things. And one of the things, again, I always encourage people to do is, don’t just go to your industry things. Go to other things. Don’t go to your industry marketing conferences. Go to marketing conferences.

Dave Young:

Or go to another industry’s marketing conference.

Stephen Semple:

If you’re in the plumbing business, go to a restaurant trade show and always ask yourself the question of, given I’m not in that business, how could I do this? Not, I’m not in that business, I can’t do this. Change the question. Go, okay, what modifications would I need to do to that to make it work for me?

Dave Young:

As you wander around in a convention that you’re not a part of, you will see opportunities that you could solve some of their problems, and you will see problems that you’ve had that you could solve by something that they’ve innovated in their industry. You’ll see it both directions.

Stephen Semple:

You do see it in both directions. That’s an awesome observation. That’s the thing I wanted to talk about because I want people to think about that. And really, at its core, boils down to this, do you want to be a leader? And by definition, that means you are striking new ground and the day you know you’re really and truly a leader is when that nutty idea you did 10 years ago? Some consultant that you’ve never met, who you don’t know, is standing up teaching the industry that this is a best practice. That’s the day when you can go, man, I’ve made it.

Dave Young:

Well put, Steven, thanks for the rant.

Stephen Semple:

All right, thanks David.

Dave Young: Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big fat juicy five star rating and review. And if you have any questions about this or any other podcast episode, email to questions at the empirebuilderspodcast.com.