If you're just copying what everyone else is doing, and 80 percent of the market is doing that, you're just going to be seen as part of that group. So stop following the followers! If you want to differentiate, it starts with that. How am I communicating my strengths to an audience that actually needs the strengths that I'm able to deliver?
David: Hi, and welcome back. In today's episode, co host Jay McFarland and I will be discussing the topic, Stop Following the Followers. Welcome back, Jay.
Jay: Hey, David. Once again, a great topic for our discussion. This one is hard. Sometimes we are sheep and we're not following a leader, right? We're following everyone else who's following that leader.
Why are we doing that?
David: Yeah, great question. Why are we doing that? I know in the early stages of my business, I did that all the time. When you don't know what to do, you're basically looking around to see what other people are doing, and very often they don't know what they're doing either.
I particularly remember in the early stages of my business where I would look at somebody who I saw as a competitor in my space, and I would say, okay, well, what are they doing?
And sometimes I would do that pretty indiscriminately, not even realizing that they may have been in worse shape than we were at that point, and I'm looking at what they're doing.
Now, fortunately, I've always been able to learn as much from bad example as I have from good. And to me, that's like a superpower.
If you're able to do that, it is extremely helpful. If you look at something that someone else is doing and you say, you know what, I am not doing that. And you see something that you like and say, well, I am going to do that. That's extremely helpful.
But very often we don't know who's doing extremely well and who's not doing as well.
And we see something we like, and we may imitate it. We may try to copy it. But, it may not be working for that person, and it very well might not work for us either.
Jay: Yeah, or I think understanding what is making them successful and what you're seeing them do, that doesn't mean that's what makes them successful.
I mean, there are many people out there who are successful in spite of all of the mistakes they're making. And that really frustrates me, David, when I see that, because here I am busting my butt to try and do it right, and I see other people that are... it's like they'd have to work hard to mess things up.
They just fall in a bucket of gold everywhere they go. Drives me crazy. It's like when I was in the radio business, we had a consultant who was paid incredible money and we're like, why does this guy know what he's doing?
Well, he happened to work for somebody who achieved major syndication. Well, just because he worked for that guy doesn't mean that he's the reason that guy was successful. And that doesn't mean we should listen to everything that he says.
David: Absolutely. I've got similar radio horror stories. I think we've all had experiences like that. We've also probably had experiences where we see someone, and our impression is that that person is successful, is smart, is doing things right, and is doing things well.
And that's not always the case. Because we don't really know what's happening behind the scenes. In our work with clients, one of the reasons we have the brand we have, TopSecrets.com, is that there are things that people don't know that can help them.
Whether you want to consider them secrets or whether you just want to consider them things that somebody's never learned, doesn't really matter. But it's a fact.
And I've had conversations with people who say, "oh, there's no such thing as secrets in business." And I'm like, "I completely disagree with that."
I completely disagree because while there are a lot of things that are common in business, and a lot of things that everybody knows. For every one of those,
