It’s never what you expect.

I was lucky to have a great break over Easter which, as well as allowing me to spend a fortnight with the children, allowed me lots of thinking and processing time.

Working with (broadly speaking) startup ecommerce businesses as a consultant is very rarely what I expect it to be, even having done this now for most of 3 years in my career.

The most continually surprising aspect has to be that small businesses think their bigger competitors can show them how to grow i.e. it’s simply a case of surveillance and reverse engineering as much as possible and that will help them bridge the gap. They will conquer the world, they calculate, if they can only replicate ~80% of what they are doing in terms of technology, media, marketing. 

I’m not going to say there is 0 value in the above theory, obviously we all want to see over the fence, but the reality is a lot more enlightening. In my experience the majority of the established long-in-the-tooth competition have actually lost track of what produced rapid growth for them in the past. In fact they often are now employing such a wide range of strategies and operating so many silos that simply would not have been effective in a smaller, rapidly scaling business.  

And time and time again I look at a new ecommerce set up for the first time and I see uniqueness in the ecommerce strategy. Yes there are overlaps with the bigger competition. Yes there are weaknesses and under exploited tactics. But it’s really difficult for me to imagine a successful start up that has simply cloned what a more established player is doing in ecommerce.

The real challenge is preserving and maximising that uniqueness and also finding the headroom that allows real sustained growth and diversification, rather than dilution.