Living and Working in Your Sustainable Sweet Spot As A Leader, Three Ways Your Differentiation Can Impact Your Profits & The Uber Flywheel
23 April 2023 Newsletter
“Your margin is my opportunity” – Jeff Bezos
Hope you’re Thriving!
It’s been a productive week with some interesting meetings and a solar eclipse.
In other news, I was delighted to finish the first draft of my new book, Onboarded for Managers. I’ll keep you up to date as we get closer to publication, but here’s a photo, alongside other photo’s when I reached the same milestone with my other books Made to Thrive and Onboarded.
Uber Flywheel
At a meeting this week, a person told me that I like your work because you make the complex simple. That’s nice, but that’s the job to be done. Of course, anyone can make something more complex, and intelligent people often do. But we must have simple, highly effective concepts that work in the mid-market.
Let’s take flywheels. Someone once thought it might be a good idea to take the simple flywheel concept and stack flywheels on top of each other. I’ve seen some flywheels showing 5,6, or 7 circles all connecting to one another that are almost comical. The key to flywheels is their simplicity. Between the points of the flywheel, we MUST be able to say, “We can’t help but”.
Let’s take a look at the Uber flywheel:
(If we provide) Lower prices with more trip availability
We can’t help but
(Create) More passenger trips (then)
We can’t help but
Attract more drivers (then)
We can’t help but
Expand the network (then)
We can’t help but
Grow revenues per fixed cost (then)
We can’t help but
(Provide) Lower prices with more trip availability (Back to 12 o’clock)
It’s the logic that matters.
If it’s too complex, you haven’t done the work to simplify it.
Uber Careshare Flywheel
This morning I came across a new offering from Uber that could potentially disrupt the car rental industry – Uber Carshare.
Uber Carshare is an Australian company that facilitates peer-to-peer car rental, a system by which individuals may rent privately owned vehicles on an hourly or daily basis to other registered users of the service. It was an Australian start-up acquired by Uber in 2022 and is currently only operating in Australian cities.
In the image below, let’s examine how the Uber and Uber carshare flywheels compare.
They’re almost exactly the same.
That’s the key. Uber has a complex strategy that has been made clear and simple. It meets the customer’s needs and creates a unique and valuable position in the market that is different from the competitors.
Oh, and I compared the hiring for a 2023 Hyundai small car, and Uber carshare was about 60% cheaper.
Three Ways Your Differentiation Can Impact Your Profits
Uber’s strategy is focused on efficiency, as many tech companies often are. But we can’t all focus on efficiency. Some businesses aren’t in tech or have constraints that limit their ability to differentiate. For example, if you’re a retailer, you may be required to have a physical store – which comes with people, inventory and rent costs.
This week we published an article outlining the three ways to differentiate.
From the article:
“Michael Porter, possibly one of the greatest thinkers on strategy, believes there are three ways towards differentiation and competitive advantage. By doing something different than competitors or doing the same thing but more efficiently. Focusing on either of those strategies or a combination of both, we can then unlock a narrow market segment where our expected profits might be.
A strong differentiation in the market must allow you to charge a higher price because you’re creating value, and/or finding efficiency thus increasing margins. Otherwise, we might have a marketing tagline, but not differentiators that will impact our bottom line.”
Read the article in full here.
AI Detecting Feelings In Real Time
This week I came across a video that made me say wow.
We all know that Ai is moving forward in leaps and bounds, but this video exceeded what I anticipated. In the video, an AI is analysing a human talking on camera and detecting feelings in real time.
Watch the video below:
The US Tax Service Interpreting the Declaration of Independence “All men are created equal.”
This Week on The Growth Whisperers Podcast
158 Living and working in your Sustainable Sweet Spot as a leader
Some parts of your role give you energy, and some parts drain your energy. Often, the parts that drain your energy can be unsustainable. When you were younger, you probably had jobs that drained your energy, and you quit those jobs, getting better jobs over time. But that’s often not possible if you’re a business owner, CEO or executive.
Over time we want to give more time to things that give us energy and less time to those parts that drain energy. This way we’re able to work hard and sustain our energy for the role. We would be tired at the end of the day, but our energy for the role would remain.
This week we talk about how to live and work in your Sustainable Sweet Spot as a leader.
Episode 158 The Growth Whisperers Podcast
Listen to The Growth Whisperers
Or watch it on YouTube
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Keep Thriving!
Brad Giles
