Your Business is in the Spaces not the Things
How easy is it to get caught up in the world of things? We think our lives are the things we own (or desire) and we treat our business the same way – the web designer who thinks it’s all about churning out the numbers and valid markup in the product… and the client who thinks it’s all about having a website (and hopefully not paying much for it).
I’m not sure I can do much for you in regards to your obsession with things in everyday life… but I can offer you some simple and far reaching advice for your business. It’s totally not about things. It’s not about how many websites you pump out of your business, or the special coffee cups, or the advertising, or the physical logo on your letterhead. These are all just things. Yes, you need them but they are the easy part.
The World of Tangible Things
If you only have ‘tangible things’ then the best you can achieve is moderate to average returns on your investment. In other words, you will struggle because things can be replicated.
If you’ve got a great looking website then your competitor can get one. If you’ve got great coffee mugs or you wear suits or you pump out huge volumes of great work – your competitors should be right beside you competing. They can hire talented prolific designers and coders, too. It’s all copyable, replicable – because these are tangible things.
The World of Intangibles
What your business really needs to concentrate on are your intangible assets – relationships, value, emotion, ideas, intellectual property and experiences.
These intangibles are extremely difficult to replicate if your competitor can even recognise them. Many of the greatest assets your business has are the inter-plays between things and people in complex webs… for example, the heterogeneous network of friends your employees use to solve complex work projects.
Tangibles & Intangibles Lead to…
Tangible things can be copied by your competitors = no competitive advantage = low to moderate returns on your investment.
But intangibles like client relationships, culture and heterogeneous social networks = competitive advantage = possibilities of higher returns on your investment.
Web Professionalism in a Nutshell
Stop thinking that being a web professional is all about building websites. That’s just what our artifacts represent to the world. Our real business is in defining and passing around those intangibles… and the websites we construct are about the same intangibles. Not the products. Not the individual graphic or coded artifacts.
No matter how great a design or perfect the code… it can be replicated in short order.
Our business is to provide our clients with more than an easily copied artifact called a website. Our business is to provide clients with a web solution to their business problem – to enhance their processes and relationships and all the other non-replicable intrinsically valuable assets… so they can gain a competitive advantage and maximise their return on investment.
Enjoy your tangibles, by all means. But work the hardest on the intangibles because they create your real value.
