Today's edition is completely different.

Issue #168

Reader

Ten questions. Ten minutes. One point each, no partial credit.

Score yourself honestly, because nobody else is watching, and the market already knows your number.

1

THE AI TEST (20 seconds, do it before you read item 2). Want to see your brand exactly the way a buyer sees it?

Open ChatGPT. Type: “What makes [your company] different from its competitors?”

Read what comes back. Generic, wrong, or could describe three of your rivals? That’s what every prospect researching you is being told right now. AI can only repeat what you’ve made clear, and at the moment, it has nothing of yours to cite.

2

THE ONE SENTENCE Can you say what makes you different in one sentence, out loud, with no adjectives in it?

Here’s the difference.

Fail: “We’re a trusted partner delivering innovative, best-in-class solutions.”
​Pass: “We train your employees not to fall for phishing emails.”

That second one is a company I named and positioned. The slogan said it all: “Human error. Conquered.” and went on to a $4.6 billion valuation.

Three words. Zero adjectives. Can’t do it? Your differentiation doesn’t exist yet.

3

PRICING POWER Could you raise prices 10% or more tomorrow and keep your best customers?

That’s not my test. It’s Warren Buffett’s, and it’s the only moat test he trusts. No? You’re a commodity with a logo, and the market priced you that way before you noticed.

4

THE ENEMY Who is your enemy?
Not a competitor. A condition.

Apple fought conformity. Patagonia fights disposability. Tesla fights the combustion engine. Liquid Death fights plastic, and picked a second fight with boring beverage marketing while it was at it.

Ask three people on your team to name yours. Three different answers, or no answer? You’ve given your market nothing to join.

5

THE THIRD VISIT Do you know what percentage of your first-time customers come back a third time?

Here’s why the third and not the second. In restaurants, only about a third of first-timers ever return at all, and the ones who reach a third visit go on to drive the majority of revenue. Visit three is where a customer stops sampling and starts belonging. Almost nobody measures that gap. Find yours this week. It’s the most honest number in your business.

6

DAY 1 OR DAY 2 Is your company still on Day 1?

Bezos named Amazon’s headquarters Day 1 and spent twenty years defending the idea behind it: a Day 1 company still behaves like it has something to prove, while a Day 2 company manages what it already built. His warning was blunt: “Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death.”

List your last three significant moves. Offense, or defending last year’s position? Most companies are on Day 2 and calling it strategy.

7

PERMISSION A customer calls with a problem. Can the employee who answers the phone fix it right then, without asking a manager?

At Ritz-Carlton, any employee can spend up to $2,000 to solve a guest’s problem. A housekeeper can make that call. If yours can’t, your culture is policy. And policy is what you install when you don’t trust your people. Nobody has ever retold a story about a company that followed its policy correctly.

8

THREE EMPLOYEES Confusion compounds faster than clarity, and it compounds inside your building before it ever reaches a customer.

Ask three people on your team, separately, to describe what the company stands for. Three different answers? Your market is getting all three, and believing none of them.

9

THE BANNED WORDS Better invites a comparison you can lose. Different ends the comparison entirely.

Search your website for: better, faster, leading, premium, innovative, trusted. Every hit is a place where you asked to be measured against someone else instead of standing somewhere they can’t.

10

THE UNPREDICTABLE What grows a business faster, the predictable or the unpredictable?

Name one thing a customer received from you in the last 90 days that they could not have predicted. Nothing comes to mind? Then you have retention, not loyalty.

Retention removes reasons to leave. Loyalty creates reasons to come back, and only one of those survives a competitor who’s 10% cheaper.

YOUR SCORE:

8 to 10: You’re differentiated. Protect it, because these are exactly the things companies delete during a rebrand.

5 to 7: You’re vulnerable. You have pieces of a brand and nothing holding them together.

Under 5: You’re competing on price. You may not have admitted it yet. Your customers decided it a while ago.

If you scored 8 or above: you’re on solid ground. Put a reminder in your calendar to run this again in 90 days, because the market doesn’t hold still and neither does your category.

If you scored 7 or below: time is not on your side. Every quarter you sit here, a competitor gets cheaper, the AI answer about you gets more generic, and another buyer decides on price because you gave them nothing else to decide on.

So I’m opening three one-on-one calls this month.

Thirty minutes. We take your lowest-scoring items and isolate the one you have to fix first, because fixing them in the wrong order costs you a year.

No pitch, no deck. If I can’t tell you something useful in thirty minutes, I’m not going to be useful in a proposal either.

​[Claim one of the three →]​

ONE LAST THING

You started this audit by letting a machine describe your company back to you.

If that was uncomfortable, it’s because it was the first time in a long while you saw your own brand from outside the building.

That’s the part nobody can do alone. You can’t score your own clarity. You’ve been explaining your business the same way for so long that you can no longer hear what’s missing from it, and everyone in your meetings has the identical blind spot, because they caught it from you.

That isn’t a weakness. It’s proximity. It’s why a Nobel-winning physicist worked with a blank sheet of paper and a person on the other side of it. It’s why every company that became unmistakable had somebody in the room willing to say the thing nobody else would say.

That’s the job I’ve done for 46 years.

If you’d rather go deeper on your own first, the full breakdown of all ten is here, with the research and the companies running each one deliberately: [Read it here →]​

David

P.S. Forward this to the one person on your team who will argue with your score. That argument is worth more than the score.