I live in a small seaside town about an hour out of Sydney. My wife and I have lived here for about 12 years. I still get grief from her for not even bargaining the owners of our house down when we made an offer. I just offered to pay them what they asked for. Why wouldn’t I? I wanted to buy their house and I had a healthy libertarian respect for property rights and what it might take to make a family give up their home.
By the time COVID hit we’d lived in the area for over a decade. We didn’t know many people but that was more a function of how my wife and I seperate ourselves from the world than a reflection on the people in the area. Everybody we have connected with is lovely. It’s a great area filled with people who know they made a trade-off living a little further out of the city.
As we get closer to the end of the year we all find ourselves running on fumes. As a consultant I have billable time and non-billable time. So when I found myself in non-billable time just a week before my Christmas leave I knew the chances were I’d be only as busy as I forced myself to be.
So I still spent the morning working on our company’s go-to-market proposition. Part of my job is to ensure the market understands who we are. We don’t have to say it explicitly. Nor do we even have to know who we are. But we need to show it. We need to be transparent about who we are even if we struggle to articulate exactly what that is. It’s a difficult balance but we are committed to it.
After my morning thinking about who we are as a company I spent the afternoon trying to clear my head. I had a few beers – a surprisingly rare lunchtime treat for me during the COVID work-from-home age. Then I had a
wander around our local area.
When I got hungry and wanted to reward the risky “2nd Best Burgers in [my area]” sign-makers I dropped in for something to eat at a tiny bar that had only just opened when COVID lockdowns began.
I consult to medium to large business in Australia and the greater Asia Pacific. So I’m in the habit of knowing how value is created. I casually noted that “you guys started at just the wrong time” when I paid for my delicious burger and pale ale.
But I was wrong. Our local hipster said “No. We didn’t really have an established business model”. He’d started the business with just himself and the chef. He’d made many more meat patties than he expected to when he started the business as the front-of-house guy. But ultimately they were able to pivot faster than the other local businesses.
For three months they ran a successful new takeaway business. Locals who didn’t know who they were before the pandemic were now embracing the business model that they were largely designing and changing as they fought to survive. “We noticed there were local takeaway food outlets but none who sold great burgers”.
My burger was delivered by somebody who understood that they had an advantage. He said “other local businesses had built up this idea that the physical space they occupied was the business”. In saying that he unpacked what we’ve all learnt about what a business actually is, or isn’t.
When technology startups tell you it’s all about pivoting towards the opportunities presented to them you might get the sense that they are faking it until they are making it. But that was a great burger – and everybody else I’ve seen walk into this joint has thought the same. I think the spirit of small businesses, thinking deeply about how they will respond to the needs they see in the market, will save us.
What we can learn from this is that we don’t know everything. Actually “we” know plenty – but we have to bring that knowledge together and recognise that there are those out in the world actually acting on less knowledge than we think we have to make delicious burgers.
In terms of “The Second Best” I also can’t help but think of Matthew Arnold.