The staffing business is constantly evolving which makes it easy to lapse into commodity hell, the dwelling place of so many national staffing companies that have long since abandoned the entrepreneurial ethos not to mention the profitability that drove them to success in the first place.
How to avoid commodity hell? As I look around at our most progressive clients, one pattern of success stands out. Although on one end these successful companies also have their share of commodity clients, on the other they are constantly looking to disrupt the status quo with high-margin, innovative services.
They disrupt by constantly pushing the envelope on how to better help their clients win. These approaches take the form of better service models as well as technological innovation, and invariably they arrive at solutions because the listen really well to clients. High touch. High technology. High profits.
Easy to say. Harder to do. I know because I’ve been caught flat-footed myself many a time. When Apple ran its now famous Super-Bowl ad (above) for the MacIntosh in 1984, I didn’t know what to think. I had spent the previous two years building my business with my nose down writing mainframe assembler code for a French airline cooperative (SITA).
My day of reckoning was about to come, however. The day after the commercial ran, the director of this French group, Claude Avignon, hauled me into his office and declared that the Mac would soon put me out of business.
Fortunately, Claude scared me enough that I went out and bought one of the first Macs. The Mac made it simple for art class flunkies like me to create marketing and training materials that wowed almost everyone in the staid airline software world.
The ads helped win business from several airlines around the world, and I’ve admired Steve Jobs ever since. When I went back to graduate school in 1988, I spent a lot of time with Jobs’ NeXT operating system which eventually underpinned the Apple platform in the decades that followed.
Lessons Learned
- Balance your commodity business with high-touch, highly-customized business
- Watch Super-Bowl commercials!
- Listen really hard to clients when they complain or tell you that your business is threatened.
- Take a page from the Apple handbook and look at how to disrupt your market.
