Differentiation Fundamentals

Keith Lauver is the founder and CEO of Gearworks.com, a Web and wireless solution provider based in Minneapolis.

As recently as 1998, positioning your company as an "interactive architect," "I-builder," or "e-solutions integrator" was enough to be competitive in the marketplace. A company could stand out simply by focusing on Internet-enabled solutions. But things have changed.

Now, every consulting, systems integration and IT solutions firm delivers Internet business applications. The ability to differentiate between the various Internet solution agencies has become significantly more difficult and yet more critical to long-term success. Differentiating is fundamentally about knowing what you are, what you are not, and communicating that effectively throughout the organization and marketplace. It's about finding your niche, knowing that you don't have to be all things to all people, and having the courage to be different and follow your vision. How can a company do that and continue to compete? Within my company, Gearworks.com, there are several specific areas where we have worked hard to establish and maintain a differentiated position.

Technology Specialization
An instant differentiator is having an in-depth understanding of best-of-breed technologies. Expertise is a commodity that should be leveraged to not only deliver the best possible solutions for your clients, but also to attract employees seeking to become those experts. In our case, expertise in delivering business applications on mobile devices and wireless networks is currently unique and highly valued by the market, opening doors for new clients and ensuring a solid return on our investment in staying current in these technologies. As another example, Allaire Corp. has continued to impress us with their software, leading us to specialize in many of their technologies including ColdFusion and Spectra. Many of our employees have informed me that a key reason why they joined Gearworks was our expertise with the Allaire Business Platform and with mobile technologies such as the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP).

Corporate Culture
An organization's culture reflects its employees' passion for their work and their drive for success. We have fostered a corporate culture that is rich with elements of technological innovation, hard work and active energy. Gearworks.com dedicates a portion of each employee's time to the "technology sandbox," where employees can tinker with the latest hardware from Nokia, Ericsson and Palm or integrate an existing platform with a new wireless protocol or even wire an RF antenna. This dedicated time for innovation coupled with hard work has become the fuel for our organizational model of a perpetual innovation engine. The products of this engine are outstanding Web and wireless solutions for our clients; the by-products are fun, active energy for our employees and significant returns for our shareholders.

Time To Delivery
In an industry where projects can be pushed out months by heavy demand, rapid delivery is a highly sought-after differentiator. The importance of a rapidly scalable organization that can respond both to advances in technology and client demand is critical. It's easy to stand out from your competition by accepting projects you can begin in six weeks when they can't begin for six months. Utilizing rapid prototyping and rapid application development, we are able to remain on the edge of technology and deliver within aggressive time constraints.

Market Focus
A clearly defined and differentiated company will have clearly defined and differentiated clients--what specific areas of the market will you own? While specializing in a vertical market or industry limits your customer base, your chances with each of those clients increase significantly. In the wireless data solutions market there are outstanding companies like 724 Solutions, which has aggressively pursued the financial services market and is now a leading provider for those companies. Having researched the scope of the mobile market opportunities, Gearworks.com is targeting wireless data solutions in the transportation and logistics markets and has become a differentiated solution provider as a result.

Strategic Alliances
The formal business relationships you keep reflect on your organization like your personal friends reflect upon you. The business alliances you maintain differentiate you from your competitors and ideally position you for market dominance. Alliance relationships include investors, clients, technology vendors and sales partners. We approach each new alliance as a strategic business move and do so by evaluating our partner's strengths just as we would evaluate the strengths of a new employee. Each time we evaluate a prospective partner we ask: What do we each bring to the table? What can we offer each other? How do our long-term strategies align? Maintaining high strategic alliance standards will differentiate your company as an organization of excellence.

A well-executed differentiation strategy will provide a sustainable competitive advantage for any organization. Strategies like technology specialization, corporate culture, time to delivery, market focus and strategic alliances can help any company achieve advantages. However, the drive to continuously improve these advantages and the ability to leverage each of them are actually the most critical elements in creating long-term value for you and your clients.

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