Each aspect of your business works and reacts to every other part of your business.
As we look to build great companies, it is common and easy to look to our market and our competitors for insight. Then react to what we see.
By doing this, we believe that some aspect of our business, whether it be our pricing, product, marketing or something else, is impacted by the market, by our customers, and by our competitors.
This is true.
Yet, most importantly, our own business is impacted by the other parts of it.
What do I mean by this?
I once heard a great analogy for sales. You cannot hire a Lamborghini salesperson to sell Toyotas for you. The same is true the other way. You cannot hire a Toyota salesperson to sell Lamborghinis. What is true about sales is true for everything.
A company that is built around building, servicing, selling a high priced product cannot exist by building, servicing, and selling a low priced product.
It’s not just about selling. It’s why you want to avoid hiring FANG engineers in a startup. It’s why you actually can disrupt that billion dollar company. It’s why your pricing often defines the type of company you build.
It also means that building your business machine in a way to work well together is as important as anything else you do.