The Garrison Report #2003-9

A Great Myth: You Want to Be the Best Contractor

Are you frustrated that less qualified, less able contractors get projects that you think you should have been awarded? You might be trying too hard to be the best. I’m sure some of you think I have really lost it this time, but let’s take a look at what I mean.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, let me assure you that I advocate that if you want to be successful, you need to be a very good at what you do. This distinction might appear to be merely semantic, but it really goes to the heart of what separates the successful companies from the others.

In my seminars I often tease my audience by saying, “Contractors are a bunch of liars.” After they squirm, I explain that every contractor who approaches a buyer of construction services claims they are “the best” contractor. However, by definition there can be only one best. That means all the contractors except one was lying, and maybe all of them were lying because the actual best contractor might not have even participated. But don’t get upset because I also add that when I worked for a developer and regularly bought construction services, I didn’t consider any of the contractors to be lying. My colleagues and I equated their comment of “we’re the best” to a similar one made by an athlete before a game when he says, “We’re going to win.” If you had an athletic team member who didn’t think his team could win, would anyone want that athlete on the team? Of course not! Well, buyers are no different. They want contractors who believe they are the best. Would you hire a company that said its competitor would do a better job for you? But saying you’re the best doesn’t get you much because everyone discounts the statement as simply expected.

The second problem is figuring out how to convince someone that you are the best. Too many clients use price as their only criterion for selecting a contractor or designer because they don’t understand the varying quality of the participants. But even if you ask the contractors or designers to explain why they are better, they can’t articulate it very well. So how do you expect the buyers to make the distinction? Part of the problem is “the best” is in the eye of the beholder, so each prospect may define “best” differently.

But the main reason for abandoning the goal of “the best” might be because it’s often not in the customer’s best interest. Why? The reality is that the last few percentage points in performance usually costs substantially more than the earlier amounts of equal improvement. Therefore, the value to the customer is actually being reduced because costs are increasing faster than the quality is improving. This is common in most industries. Providing a particular product or service to make you the best will cause some people to pay a premium, but most won’t care. Every construction project is unique. If it hasn’t ever been built before, how can you prove that you will be the best at building it? You can’t!

Therefore, the effort to be the best might cause your services to become too expensive without a means to justify the increased cost. But again, I want to remind you, while you don’t want to be the best, you do want to be very good.

 

Be Different

Instead of being the best, I suggest that you be different. In fact, you want to be memorably different. This will get people to talk about you. The trick is you want to be different in ways that your customers find advantageous. When you do this, you eliminate your competition. Let’s compare the situation to baseball. Your team needs a shortstop. The player who is considered to be the best player in the league is available, but he is an outfielder. However, there is an available shortstop. He’s not as good as the outfielder, but he is a top player. Who would you select? The answer is simple: the shortstop.

In essence, the same applies to business. If you determine what special services you can provide for your clients—what makes you different—you can eliminate the competition. It is a matter of not which firm is the best but which one fits better. This makes your company the best for the situation, just like the shortstop.

If you would like to learn more about differentiation, read The Garrison Report 2002-12 by going to www.tedgarrison.com/resources/garrison-report or contact Ted Garrison to learn how your company can develop a business strategy to differentiate it from its competitors and increase profit margins.

 


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