Your future competition will miss your “Lever”

Way back in the day I was a Sysop for something called a BBS – a Bulletin Board System – an old school version of what would eventually become the internet –

Instead of going to a website, you would actually dial in via a land line to someone’s desktop computer, 1 at a time, and play games, post messages and swap files. When I got my own desktop and my own land-line – a huge deal at the time – I was off and running.

I made my own BBS and at one point had almost 100 users, although again … nobody could log in more than 1 at a time.

The holy grail, the big enchilada, was this one BBS in town where you could have 8 people logged in at once !! It was amazing. You could do all kinds of stuff, but mostly people would go into a chat room and just chat with random strangers. This BBS was always busy, because there was no other one like it where you could have 8 different lines at once. It was crazy. Felt like the funny line from back to the future, where Marty McFly lets slip that his family has 2 TV sets.

Oh he’s just joking, nobody has 2 TV’s !

And nobody had a BBS with EIGHT SEPARATE LINES !! It was impossible!!

But hey, I was a cool “Sysop” [System Operator], with a popular BBS, why not go for the upgrade and make a new BBS with 4 or 8 lines – heck maybe even 16 lines… !

Nobody has 16 lines !!

My pea-brain for business got started talking to adults and putting together numbers – well if a land line costs 30 bucks a month – then 8 landlines will cost $270 – so how do I make these numbers work ?

I can vividly remember one particular conversation I had with my Uncle Peter about this new and improved BBS, which I totally wanted to have 16 different phone lines. I was talking to him, because I was talking to every adult over the age of 21 who could help me with my big new business idea, and he hit me with one of the most simple questions.

“Why do you want to do this? It seems like a lot of work … ”

Well it will be fun. And I know how to do it because I’ve already done it with my own BBS.

But what makes you want to do it instead of just using the existing BBS with 8 lines?

Well mine will be better ?

Why will it be better?

Because I will have more games … and more lines?

And so why do you want to do all this work ?

Because it will be fun …

Maybe you can see where all this was headed.

My Uncle Peter was just asking me the same questions over and over again to point out a few things. Mainly I had no idea what I was talking about or what I was doing … which was kinda obvious … I was 13 years old at the time….

But more importantly, that I was missing a key lever, a key WHY. Why is this going to be better than what is already out there? Why do you want to embark on all this risk and cost and future work? What problem are you solving? What issue are you gonna do better than everyone else?

And he was right, I just wanted to have FUN running a BBS with 8 lines.

And …

This will be the same logic that several of your current players in your sports league will use when they start up their own sports league to eventually compete with you.

If this hasn’t happened yet … well … you can thank me later …

Don’t worry about competition – If nobody wants to compete with you, then you probably don’t have anything worth doing or worth stealing – worry instead about what your key LEVER is WHEN they start competing with you.

When those former players, maybe even former “friends,” start up their own sports league, running the same sports you do … but WAY BETTER, let them focus on the things that they think are important – The rules are off, the league can be better because its cheaper and more about the game and not “making money,” and hey … it will be FUN to run a sports league … just like that BBS.

But here is the catch – if you have a really good product, to outsiders it will look easy. You will have created a foundation and a platform where people can complain about tiny stuff – a slight change to a passing rule in your co-ed flag football league – because you’ve gotten all the big stuff right.

Your players have the luxury of complaining about this rule, because your refs are showing up on time, and their aren’t gigantic holes in your football field, and people don’t routinely leave your games limping or in ambulances because they’ve gotten the heck beaten out of them by the other team.

A good business and product, makes it look so simple that people feel like they could not only do it … but do a better job with it…. just like I thought about that 8 line BBS.

But what is the lever underneath the hood, that will make your future competition fail, when they start competing with you?

Is it your prizes, is it your cool logo? Is it an awesome rulebook? Your fun Instagram account ?

Not really …

Its likely much simpler than that – its your field staff, your locations, and your ability and confidence to weed out people that don’t belong in your league and will literally ruin the fun for everyone else.

This is what my uncle peter was asking me for when he kept talking me in circles that one day when I was 13 – he kept asking me what my lever was.

Do people love something only you know?
Do people really hate something that you can fix?
Can you upend and old industry?
Can you take something that was previously secret or private to a select few and open it up to the masses ?

These are all potential levers. Levers that are much more powerful than “it will be fun to do what I love.”

Bumble, the online dating app, came up with one of the simpler levers of all time. They built a 2 billion dollar empire on one simple lever:

Give the ladies the control over decisions ….

Now of course this is old news. You can probably see the results of that lever fading over time along with the stock price, and a traditional story of a once invincible CEO eventually run out of town by a board of directors.

But that lever was the WHY … why are you doing this … why do you want to run an 8 line BBS – why do you want to run a co-rec sports league when people can LIKELY PLAY THE SAME SPORTS FOR CHEAPER WITH THE LOCAL PARKS AND REC DEPARTMENT.

If you can already play softball with the parks department, you had better have a pretty good why.

The WHY better be more than, I don’t like a couple of rules, or this place used to be a lot of fun but now it feels more like a corporation with rules and policies.

Do you know what company switches from a fun free-for-all to a more serious company with payment policies and FAQ’s and guidelines?

Every start-up that ever succeeds through the first 3-5 years and makes the transition to become a real small business.

The things we used to do, when we first started out … were crazy. We would spend thousands of dollars on custom champ shirts, give away tons of money in drink prizes to the point that our bowling leagues and mini-golf leagues would sometimes lose money, and in some cases pay extra for alcohol permits just in case people wanted to drink at a ball field (the league itself would lose money) all in the hopes that people would like us and think we were cool.

We didn’t have the confidence to say, this is our sports league, its not for everyone, if you don’t like it you should play somewhere else.

Then we became a real business, and stopped doing all of these things. Because being cool, is not a lever for a long term business, its just a fad that cycles through, like the latest slang (6,7) or the coolest nightclub that wont even be in business in 2 years time.

And in every case, when we stopped doing un-sustainable things that made no sense, drink prizes and champ shirts, and league shirts, and alcohol permits, what were we always told:

“Yeah you are gonna fail because you are becoming too corporate, people are talking about starting up a new league to compete with you … “

And some people even did. And some people even took some of our customers…. and then those customers came back and said something like:

“Holy crap … I never realized how good we had it here… ”

Competition is a good thing. It’s not something to be feared. It means you have something that is worth something and other people want it … a story as old as time.

If you make things look easy, and you end up with more competition, even better.

Make sure you have a lever that is worth something, that makes it easier to combat the competition WHEN it crops up.

Your lever should be real and concrete, not vibey and cool, not we try harder or work harder, never we love it more than they do….

And that competitor may be a great place to send customers who you would get rid of anyway and will wreck the product and small business you are trying so hard every day to create from scratch … hopefully with the help of a really good sports league business platform.