The Swiss Army Knife

All of us are selling something to someone.

Ah yes the products that we sell. What business is a business without sales? No company can survive on good looks alone. Imagine yourself starting a new venture. Imagine yourself going out and renting office space. Buying office furniture and equipment. Leasing computers, servers racks, hubs etc. Imagine yourself sifting through resumes, interviewing and hiring employees. Creating a company logo, website, and printing business cards. Imagine that… well, that’s it, you are done now just enjoy the revenue. If it were only that easy. At the end of the day, you have to ask people for money in return for something.

If we drill down to the core, we find that there are two types of basic products: 1. Tangible Products such as software, automotive parts, home furnishings or computer hardware and 2. Service Products such as Cloud Migration, Attorney, Accountant, Office Equipment Maintenance & Repair, Consulting of any kind and Online Blogs/Vlogs. I’m sure we can define more categories and subcategories but the point of this blog is to point out that regardless of what you sell and which of the two categories you fall into, we are all selling a Product.

I’m speaking to everyone here. I don’t care if you’re just starting out or have an established business. I don’t care if you might already have your product or products lined up, or you’re still looking for what to sell. The message is the same: If you want to Ruin Your Business, you must sell a Swiss Army Knife.

Now before I dive into what a Swiss Army Knife is and why you MUST have one. Let’s agree to one thing first: unless you are selling something very very specific that is geared for a very specific type of client such as Ballet Shoes, your client base is large, diverse, spread out and comes in many shapes, colors and sizes.

No two clients are alike.

Let’s create an example. Now I personally come from the software and IT world an I tend to fall back towards what I know. In our example, say you are building an online platform that manages an organization’s onboarding and training process for their employees. Every individual in the organization will have a profile and a login. They can fill out HR related forms and take required courses such as “Sexual Harassment”.

First, we will define the global problem. “What features do I build?”. To answer this question we have to understand who our clients are. So let’s break this down. Since our product is online and software based in nature, our potential clients are located across the entire United States. Actually across the entire globe but let’s stick to the US. Now, how big are they? Well, they can be small: 5 – 250 employees or large: with over 5,000 employees. Their size has no impact on our product. From a financial standpoint, they can be mom ‘n pop shops or fortune 500, as long as they pay, we don’t care.

Ok back to the nitty-gritty. This is where the fun begins. What features and functionality do we implement? If we don’t build enough features, how will we compete with our competition? Here’s the problem. Since, as we have already established, each client is unique, how do we make everyone happy? We have an entire country worth of potential clients. The answer is we build and sell the “Swiss Army Knife”. Back to our product. We will build the obvious: login, user profile, main landing page, notifications and messaging capabilities. For the core features: in the main landing page you will see HR related documents you must sign and you will see videos assigned to you to watch. Our pricing model is simple, each client pays a $1,500 one time setup fee plus $5 per month per employee/account. There, we have our product.

Out in the real world, you run across a few clients that are holding companies. They own a few companies that are not related. They would like to maintain everything under one account but have the ability to differentiate employees and keep them in separate environments. You meet another potential client that wants our system to perform background checks on potential employees. Another client wants a type of university for their employees and have the ability to create a curriculum based on training videos. Someone else would like to manage employee shifts since all of their employees are already in this system. Other clients already use an HRIS system and want you to integrate with theirs so they don’t have to re-create and double manage employee profiles. Your competition started a facebook like news feed in their product so now we have to compete.

Let’s not forget about pricing? A few clients don’t want to pay per employee/account per month, they would rather pay per video course watched. Others would like to pay per document signed. One client wants to sell the videos to his employees, hence not having to pay anything.

Every single company in the United States is NOW a real potential client.

The best way to Ruin Your Business is to build the Swiss Army Knife above. Do not focus your product to what you know and what you do best. Build the full gambit of every feature you can think of and every feature every client can think of. Back to imagining: regardless of who you are meeting with, be it Intuit or Bob’s Corner Butchery, regardless of what their needs are and their financial capabilities, you have a solution for everyone. Nobody can honestly say no to you during a sales presentation because you have an answer for every objection.

The Swiss Army Knife (SAK) approach allows you to spend at least 5 times more than your original development budget. It will take an army of sales reps across the entire nation to sell this. It will take roughly 2 years minimum to develop. Don’t forget we don’t release anything to the market until it’s completely done. We don’t want our competition stealing our ideas. More on this in another blog. Think about it, once the product is done you can legitimately tell potential clients you have been around for years.

The SAK approach does make it difficult to define a clear message of who you are. It does make marketing very difficult since you now have to market to everyone everywhere. Yes, you have to triple your support staff and quadruple your dev team. Yes, it doubles your legal team to support every kind of contract. Yes, it prevents you from providing your clients with what they really need but that’s ok, you’re selling to everyone. SAK allows you to be everything to everyone.

This is how you Ruin Your Business.
See you at the fire sale!

We are going to cover marketing the SAK approach in another blog, just for fun.