“if you’re the best, you’ll get everyone else’s customers.” It feels true. It’s satisfying to believe. And it’s incomplete enough to hurt you.
There’s a name for this trap. Michael Gerber wrote about it in The E-Myth Revisited, probably the most-read book by first-time business owners in print. Gerber’s core idea is that most small businesses are started by a technician who suffers an “entrepreneurial seizure” — someone great at the work who decides that because they’re great at the work, they should own a company that does the work. Those are two different jobs. Being excellent at one tells you almost nothing about your odds at the other.
You can’t just be the best at your thing. You have to be the best at business.
Those are not the same skill, and Canadian small business data backs this up hard. Statistics Canada’s long-running research into business failure found that the leading cause isn’t a bad product or a weak market — it’s inexperienced management. Firms fail because owners haven’t mastered the basic internal skills: financial knowledge, communication, staff supervision, and market development. Not craft. Management.
Being the best at your craft earns you customers one at a time. Being good at business is what lets you keep them, staff for them, sell to them again, and survive long enough for the “best” part to matter at all.
What “good at business” actually looks like
Marketing. Nobody buys the best thing they’ve never heard of. Being the best trainer, electrician, or accountant in town means nothing to a customer who doesn’t know you exist. Marketing is the bridge between your skill and someone’s awareness of it.
Hiring. You can’t personally deliver “the best” to every customer forever. At some point your capacity caps out, and the only way to grow past it is to hire, train, and trust other people to deliver something close to your standard.
Selling more, more often, to your best clients. Most owners chase new customers and ignore the ones they already have — even though the clients who already trust you are the cheapest, easiest revenue in the business.
Managing people. Payroll, scheduling, cash flow, difficult conversations with underperforming staff. Unglamorous, and it has nothing to do with how good you are at the actual work — and everything to do with whether the company survives.
Being the best gets you in the door. These are what keep the lights on.
Leveraging partnerships: Rogue and CrossFit
[PERSONAL STORY PLACEHOLDER — Rogue Fitness’s early relationship with CrossFit as an example of leveraging partnerships.]
Four times the better product lost anyway — and exactly how
Sony Betamax vs. JVC’s VHS. Sony launched Betamax in 1975 with sharper picture and better sound than anything else on the market — genuinely the better format. JVC’s VHS, released a year later, was technically worse. Here’s the how: JVC licensed VHS openly to any manufacturer who wanted to build a player and courted movie studios to release films on the format. Sony kept Betamax locked to its own hardware. Within a few years, VHS players were cheaper and more widely available, and video stores stocked more titles on VHS because more studios supported it. By 1988, even Sony had given up and started building VHS machines. The open licensing strategy beat the better picture.
WordPerfect vs. Microsoft Word. Through the 1980s, WordPerfect was the word processor professionals trusted — more powerful and more precise, dominant in legal and corporate markets. Here’s the how: Microsoft owned Windows, the operating system nearly every business PC ran on, and bundled Word into it, eventually folding it into the Office suite at a price no standalone competitor could match. It wasn’t a better writing tool. It was a distribution channel WordPerfect never had access to. By the mid-1990s, WordPerfect had been sold off and Word owned the market.
Dollar Shave Club vs. Gillette. In 2010, Gillette held roughly 70% of the U.S. razor market, backed by more than a century of R&D into genuinely superior blade technology. Here’s the how: Dollar Shave Club didn’t try to out-engineer Gillette. In 2012 they shot a $4,500 video, mailed razors directly to customers on a $1-a-month subscription, and skipped the retail aisle — and its markup — entirely. The razors weren’t even as good as Gillette’s, by most accounts. But the marketing was sharper and the distribution model was cheaper and more convenient. By 2016, Gillette’s share had dropped to 54%, and Unilever bought Dollar Shave Club for a billion dollars.
Kodak and the digital camera. Kodak’s own engineer, Steve Sasson, built the world’s first digital camera in 1975 — years ahead of any competitor, inside Kodak’s own labs. This one’s a management failure, not a market one: Kodak’s entire business was built around selling film and printing paper, and leadership chose not to build a company around the technology that would eventually replace it, worried about cannibalizing what they already had. Competitors who weren’t protecting a film business built the digital camera market instead. Kodak filed for bankruptcy in 2012.
Four different mechanisms — licensing, bundling, marketing and distribution, and a management decision — but the same lesson: being the best at the thing was necessary. It was never sufficient.
The bottom line
Statistics Canada is blunt about it: the leading cause of small business failure is inexperienced management, not a weak product. Rogue needed the CrossFit partnership to grow. VHS beat a better picture with open licensing. Word beat a better writing tool with bundling. Dollar Shave Club beat better blade technology with marketing and a subscription model. Kodak invented the camera that killed it, then chose not to build a business around it.
Get good at marketing. Get good at hiring. Get good at selling more, more often, to the clients who already trust you. Get good at managing people.
Being the best is the price of entry. Being good at business is what lets you stay.
