Taking on a Giant

Sometimes to make a game or activity more fun you can just change the rules. In business when it’s almost impossible to compete in a traditional manner you must change the game by changing the rules.

Take for example my personal golf scoring system – you count the shot you play. No wonder people love to play with me; that slice into the woods didn’t happen. “This isn’t Augusta and it’s not the Master’s,” I always say, “so have fun and enjoy yourself.”

This begs the question: why do we so easily fall into the trap of letting others in business, often industry leaders, write the rules that determine how we must compete with them? From their perspective they are establishing the rules to erect barriers to entry for potentially serious competition. They intentionally leverage their sheer size, abundance of resources and robust legal teams to intimidate and inhibit true competition. I practiced this specific strategy with Pizza Hut when we established a 50% share of pizza dollars and occasions in the Atlanta market in the mid-90’s. In reality when most competitors play by the rules the leaders write they are quickly discouraged and end up settling for second tier success.

In 2000 IBM was riding a huge growth wave with their new DB2 undistributed database (UDB) product. The DB2 UDB technology was basically responsible for the .com revolution because the scalability of this new database allowed even small businesses to enjoy capabilities of technology that previously were only available to big companies. IBM had created a whole new industry with the incredibly rapid growth and expansion of DB2 UDB – it was the database performance monitoring and enhancement industry.

In addition to IBM there were close to a hundred other companies claiming that their database monitoring and tuning tools were the best. To be brutally honest the results for all of these companies, including IBM, were marginal at best. There was one little company, however, whose results literally towered above all the others. They were one of my all-time favorite clients named Database-GUYS Inc.

How Scott Hayes, the founder and president, and I met is a good story for another time. Scott hired me to develop a comprehensive marketing plan. His company offered a full line of incredibly effective tools and they were ready to grow. They had the product – all they needed was the right message and method to communicate it.

Over several months we planned and accomplished a total marketing makeover based upon a clear, concise UVP (rule #4) and new brand identity including name, logo and look. Database-GUYS Inc. was transformed into DGI.

We intentionally designed the logo and color schemes to conjure associations with IBM. We considered them our primary competitor and decided to take them on.

Perhaps the biggest and boldest move we made was to introduce “breakthrough results” into the conversation. While everyone else was talking about incremental improvement we boasted that DGI tools provided breakthrough results. We showed that companies that thought they needed new servers could recover up to 80% of their CPU usage and keep the same servers for two to three times longer. IBM hated DGI because DGI had changed the rules (rule #9) and had taken the leadership position for performance monitoring and tuning tools (rule #14) from them.

DGI grew over three hundred percent during the next year, became openly acknowledged as the industry leader and was eventually acquired by BMC to protect their own business base. After Scott Hayes served the mandatory contractual time with BMC he left to found DBI, his new company that makes the best in class UDB performance monitoring and tuning tools available today (www.dbisoftware.com).

If you are interested in discovering how you might rewrite the rules and begin looking like the leader in your industry don’t hesitate to holler. I’d love to work with you.