Don't Stand Out from the Crowd. Avoid the Crowd.
Most businesses don't have a differentiation problem. They have a perception problem.
They believe they're different. They're not. They've just learned to say the same things louder.
Better service. Higher quality. Stronger culture. These aren't differentiators — they're the price of admission. Every competitor in your space is saying the exact same thing. Shouting them harder doesn't make them true. It just adds to the noise.
Real differentiation isn't found in what you do. It's found in how you do it.
Will Guidara didn't make Eleven Madison Park one of the best restaurants in the world by serving better food than everyone else. He reimagined what hospitality could mean — building an experience so intentional, so specific, that it created its own category. The food was the baseline. The how was the differentiator. He wrote a whole book about it (it’s amazing btw)
The Masters doesn't compete with other golf tournaments. No phones. Patrons, not fans. First cut, not rough, and so on. Rules that seem almost absurd by modern sports standards. That's not tradition for tradition's sake — it's a deliberate construction of an experience nobody else has. They didn't stand out from the crowd. They left it entirely.
We do this in our business. When placing a CEO in a peer group, we don't fill open seats by title. We place by growth stage. Where someone actually is in building their company, not by their title. It's a small operational decision that changes everything about the value delivered. That's the how. That's the differentiator.
A mistake I see is leaders identifying something real —be it culture, people, service, or quality—and then treating it as a marketing message rather than an operational obsession. Differentiation isn't a tagline. It's a series of deliberate choices about how you actually do the work.
So, the question isn't are you different. It's — where specifically does your how diverge from everyone else's?
If you can't answer that with something concrete and operational, you're likely still in the crowd.
Lesson Learned: Table stakes dressed up as differentiation is still table stakes. The companies worth paying attention to don't compete harder in the existing space — they build a new one through the deliberate, specific choices in how they operate. Find your how. Own it completely.