In the nearly two decades that I have been mentoring clients, especially startups where I asked them to articulate their value proposition, a vast majority of them will say that essentially their value proposition is they will be a One-Stop shop whereby they’re going to do a lot of different things rather than be a specialist in any one type of a thing.
Whenever I encounter a client like that, I always remind them of Jim Collins’s book Good to Great, where he talks about the Hedgehog concept. Basically, the concept is comparing a fox to a hedgehog,
The fox is a very cunning animal. He has a lot of different skill sets. He can look at a particular problem, and over time he can overcome them by looking at it from a lot of different ways. However, the fox is not an apex predator. The fox just kind of exists somewhere in that in that Predator food chain, and he’s not the apex predator.
The hedgehog, by contrast, is quite frankly very slow and small. Attributes that would generally make them easy prey for any predator. But it does have one thing that it does better than anybody else. Whenever it encounters a problem, it simply rolls into a ball, and those spikes that it has on its back act as protection and makes the hedgehog very undesirable for any predator that wants to eat them.
I tell clients that it’s so much better to be like that hedgehog where you’re really good at one thing rather than just ok at a lot of different things.
When you actually dissect the hedgehog concept, it boils down to three things.
You have to be able to be really the best at something. A lot of my clients might go into an industry that they don’t really know much about. They chose it because they think it’s an up-and-coming field. In these cases, I generally try to discourage them and say listen, it’s better to be good at one particular thing and be known as one of the best people in that craft.
The other thing is you have to have some degree of passion for it. You have to be able to enjoy it enough that you’re willing to overcome many of the adversities that you’re likely to have. If you’ve got a high degree of passion or when you’re really trying to provide a solution to a customer that you really feel quite passionate about, you’re willing to go through those periods of adversity and continue to have stick-to-itiveness.
The third part of that concept is you have to be able to make money at it. Obviously, if you’re really good at something or you’re really passionate about it, but nobody’s willing to pay for it, it’s going to be hard to run it as a business. In conclusion, I think of the movie City Slickers where Jack Palance talks to Billy Crystal on a horse ride, and he simply holds up his finger and he says, “It’s that one thing.” So it’s better to be good at one thing rather than cast a wide net and be good at a lot of things because, at best, you’ll just be mediocre.
