Ask ten SME owners what their growth strategy is and eight will describe some version of “be better than the competition” — better service, better quality, better value. It sounds like strategy. It is actually the absence of one. If your growth plan starts with “us, but better,” you have picked a fight you cannot win: a war of attrition against competitors with more capital, more staff, and more runway than you. The businesses that grow fastest in a crowded market are rarely the best version of everyone else. They are the only version of themselves — the category of one.

Michael Porter made the point decades ago and it is still routinely ignored: competing to be the best is not a strategy, it is a tournament — and tournaments have one winner while everyone else loses margin. When every competitor in a category is chasing the same customer with the same pitch — quality, service, value — the only lever left is price, and price wars are a race to the bottom that favours whoever can survive on the thinnest margin the longest. That is rarely the smaller business.

The enemy here is not your competitors. It is the belief that differentiation is a marketing exercise you bolt on after the business is built, rather than a strategic decision that shapes what you build in the first place.

I use a three-step exercise with clients who feel stuck in a “me too” market. It takes one afternoon, not a strategy offsite.

1. Map the real comparison set — not who you think you compete with, but who your last five lost deals actually chose instead. It is rarely who you assumed.

2. Find the uncontested attribute — the thing every business in your comparison set could claim, but none of them actually says out loud. It is almost always sitting in your own customer reviews, unclaimed.

3. Own the language — pick the specific word or phrase that describes that attribute and use it everywhere, relentlessly, until it becomes synonymous with your name. A category of one is built through repetition of a claim nobody else is making, not through a better logo.

“Talking with Kevin the first time was so valuable and we were learning so much. Within an hour Kevin had us thinking about our business and our goals in a totally different way. In fact we were supposed to be catching a flight but we decided it was more important that we continued the meeting with Kevin.”

— Angus and Cameron, Flatpack Co

Most owners can articulate the logic of differentiation in about thirty seconds. Almost none of them execute it, for one simple reason: narrowing your positioning feels like narrowing your market, and narrowing your market feels like leaving revenue on the table. So businesses default to broad, safe, “for everyone” messaging that ultimately resonates with no one strongly enough to be chosen first.

This is precisely where an outside eye earns its keep. You are too close to your own business to see the uncontested attribute — it feels obvious to you, so you assume it is obvious to everyone, and you stop saying it out loud. A second set of eyes that has sat inside dozens of businesses can usually spot it inside a single working session.

If your positioning could be swapped with a competitor's website and nobody would notice, that's the first thing we fix.