John grew up in a middle class town in an average middle income family, attended average schooling and got a typical entry level job. However, John always knew he was different. His strength being his ability to think scenarios through and more often than not come up with plans that were far smarter than most of his peers. In high school he coached the local junior soccer team to the finals of the district tournament and won it. In college he seemed to do far less studying than his friends but achieve similar results as the brightest of them. When he started his job at ABC Widgets John was able to quickly move though the business because of his ability to understand the market better than his peers. It wasn’t until his boss one day said it in a meeting that John knew why he was different. “You are very strategic John” his boss said. “You are always able to think scenarios through and come up with great solutions that help us compete very well in the marketplace”.
John wore his label of being strategic with pride. He made sure he continued to take time thinking about his business and as a result he was able to outmanoeuvre the competition for many years. This was until a new competitor XYZ Widgets entered the market selling near identical widgets to John’s company. John was confident he would be able to easily beat XYZ because of course…John was strategic. So John applied his usual process, locked himself in his office and really thought long and hard about how to beat XYZ. Much to John’s horror, however, when the market share numbers came in that quarter XYZ was taking a lot of customers away from ABC. So John doubled down on his strategy. He spent all week and also most of Saturday strategising about his business. Eventually implementing a plan he was sure would take XYZ out of the market. Unfortunately for John when the market share numbers came in again ABC had lost even more customers. This process repeated for a year where every time ABC lost customers and John would focus even more on improving the strategy. However, the outcome never changed. Every quarter ABC kept losing customers.
Dejected after another day of poor quarterly results, John went off to the local watering hole to have a beer and recite his story to the barman. It made no sense. John was the best at strategy and yet this new competitor was beating him. Nobody thought more about his business than he did. Just then a young man named Paul sat at the bar next to John. Paul was gleaming from ear to ear and was clearly in the mood to celebrate. “I’m glad at least one of us had a good day” remarked John.
“I had an excellent day” remarked Paul. “Our company is doing really well. We have achieved over 12 months of market share gains and are taking the widget market by storm”. This caused John to sit up. “Tell me more as I’m really struggling at the moment” replied John. Sipping his beer Paul proceeded “You see we have this very strong competitor. They understand the market better than we do. Better than anyone else. But we are beating them. We are beating them because of the simple reason that while they understand their market better than us, we simply open one hour earlier and close one hour later every day. Heck we didn’t have an actual plan to do this. But it’s actually worked!”
“Which company are you from?” asked John although he already knew the answer. “I’m Paul from XYZ Widgets. Very good to meet you”. John wondered “How long did it take you to think of that strategy?” . “Not very long” replied Paul. “One of our staff members wanted to come in early and leave early every day and another wanted to start a bit later and leave a bit later. That’s why we open earlier and close later. There was no actual plan to do this. But hey it’s worked”
THE END
300Paychecks 