Better, Faster or Cheaper

I recently sat down and did a podcast interview with the good people over at BEATS WORKING Show and had the opportunity to tell one of my favorite origin stories.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0CfFyPm2WuI6CSSFfJf0B6?si=QMkVud7VQp-GnnrzHCXs9w&context=spotify%3Ashow%3A1auY4JcvXdIWFjV4ehdgPk

In order to attend a better high school I actually broke the rules. I used the address of a family friend in order to go to school in a different school district. The new school was only around 2 miles in distance from my front door, but the economic realities even today are still that the average annual income in my neighborhood is ~$35K compared to ~$72K in my new school district. The short story is that the literal distance between the two places doesn't come close to explain the figurative distance between them.

I learned so many things during this transition that I could fill a book with just those lessons. One of those stories is "The Helicopter Story"

During the last day of school in my junior year I was waiting for all of the school buses to pull off before I started walking home. This had become my routine since I lived outside of the district and I never liked the feeling of walking while all of the other kids rode past me on the school bus or in their cars. On this particular day one of the upperclassmen who I knew a bit was waiting as well. He said his father was coming to pick him up and then they had to race to the airport to be in Maryland for a dinner tonight. At this point in my life I had never even been on an airplane and the idea of being in Churchill, PA at 3pm with dinner plans somewhere in Maryland for the same evening seemed like some kind of science fiction but at this point I had been in the school for 3 years and was acutely aware that I didn't even know what I didn't know. While I was processing the idea that this kid was going to be at a dinner in another state in just a few hours he pointed to the sky and said, "Here comes my dad". I look up and see a helicopter approaching the school. I laughed out loud that he had "made me look" and got me with this joke but when I studied his face I realized the joke was on me. His father was REALLY in that helicopter!

The helicopter landed near the baseball field on a platform that up until that very moment I assumed was a staging area for track and field events. My classmate ran back into the school and opened the opportunity for me to speak to his father who was now approaching. For 3 years I had been asking people questions "How did you get your own car?" "The swimming pool you are talking about is at your house?" "You left the country this summer???", so I was ready when he approached.

Me: Excuse me sir. I hope this doesn't come across as rude, but how did you get a helicopter? What do you do?

Helicopter Dad: (Reaches into his pocket) I make these.

He then proceeded to hand me a plastic knife and spoon.

Me: You invented spoons?

Helicopter Dad: (Laughing) No, I didn't invent spoons. I never invented anything for that matter. I started a company that manufactures plasticware and I sell it to every school district in Pennsylvania and almost every hospital in New Jersey. I have a meeting with some officials in Maryland tonight about selling them plasticware which is why we have to fly via helicopter to the airport to arrive on time. My job is all about relationships and convincing people that my product is better than the competition.

He left me with 2 things that day. I kept the plasticware and carried it in my pocket the entire summer and told the story to anyone who would listen, but the most import thing he left with me that day is a lesson on competition. Up until that day I pretty much assumed that the kind of people who had the money to fly in helicopters were either famous, inherited a bunch of money or invented something. My assumptions about inventors couldn't have been more wrong. In many cases the inventor merely starts with a first mover advantage because they are introducing the product or service to the market place but the reality is post introduction the end users rarely care about who invented a product. Instead they gravitate to products that are Better, Faster or Cheaper.

You don't need to invent a new category of business in order to win in the market. You simply have to create a product or service that is:

Better - Your product or service is more effective than the competition. Your expertise, engineering and attention to detail has produced a world class experience than no one else can match. You can win by being better

Faster - The competition may be delivering a product or service that is essential to the customer's business and well worth what they are paying for it, but you can deliver that same product more efficiently. "Handmade" implies quality it also implies an inability to produce products quickly and at scale. You can win by being faster.

Cheaper - Perhaps the competition has rolled out a $4K spatial computing headset that has captured the imagination of the masses with social media videos popping up all over the place documenting use cases, but this marketing of a headset in this space can boost your sales if you manage to produce a slightly inferior product at a cheaper price. You can win by being cheaper.

Example: The division responsible for Quest headsets and the Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses brought in a record $1.07 billion in the fourth quarter of 2023 (October-December).

You don't have to be an inventor to win in a category of products or services. You can win by being Better, Faster or Cheaper. If you can manage to do all 3 then you won't just win, you will dominate.

Thanks Helicopter Dad