What if the key to standing out wasn’t about doing things better than your competitors, but about doing things that they’re not doing at all?

And why should you be benchmarking the worst aspects of your competition – instead of the best?

In this episode, I’m sharing a personal story from my college swimming days where trying too hard to beat the competition led me to make a costly mistake—and a crucial lesson in marketing strategy.

And you’ll hear about reverse benchmarking, a concept from U.K. marketer Rory Sutherland, and how it helped one restauranteur redefine their service by focusing on what others were neglecting.

Instead of copying what others were doing best, they leaned into what wasn’t being done well—and turned it into their competitive advantage.

I’ll also share the case study of how I’ve applied this strategy to Mic Drop Moments, my video marketing service, to serve clients who are being underserved by the market. This approach allowed me to carve out a unique space in the crowded marketing world and help clients get visible without competing on the same tired strategies.

So if you find yourself looking over your shoulder and copying what everyone else is doing and want a more strategic way to stand out, this episode is for you.

Resources

Build your brand on social media effortlessly: Learn more about Mic Drop Moments

If you’re the best-kept secret in your industry, it’s time to change that.

Because when you start showing up with clarity, confidence, and the right content—your ideal clients won’t just notice you. They’ll choose you.

Don’t miss your chance to get a free video brand assessment to start creating videos that actually work for your business.

Schedule your video brand assessment here >

Thanks for tuning in. If you found this episode helpful, share it with another expert entrepreneur who’s ready to stop blending in.

And I’ll see you next time—on The Standout Business Show.

Transcript

Brad Powell: 0:06

What if the key to standing out wasn’t about doing things better than your competitors, but about doing things that they’re not doing at all? In today’s episode, I’m sharing a personal story of how focusing on the wrong thing cost me a race and how that lesson led me to a powerful marketing strategy that you can start using today. Welcome back to the Standout Business Show. I’m your host, brad Powell, and in today’s solo episode, I’m diving into a concept that’s been an absolute game changer for my business capitalizing on your competitors’ blind spots and I’m going to share a story from my college swimming days where focusing too much on the competition not only caused me to lose a race, but actually get disqualified. But it wasn’t just the loss of the race that taught me a lesson. It was how I shifted my focus that ultimately led to a breakthrough strategy. We’re going to explore the power of reverse benchmarking. This is a term coined by an OG marketer from the UK named Rory Sutherland, and how one restaurant used it to stand out by focusing on what others weren’t doing. So if you find yourself looking over your shoulder and copying what everyone else is doing and want a more strategic way to stand out, this episode is for you. Let’s dive into it.

Brad Powell: 1:42

So it was the end of my first year in college. I’m a freshman, I’m on the swimming team and now it’s time for the conference championship, where all of the swimming teams from Eastern Canada gathered to compete, and my best race was the 50-yard freestyle. Now, all year long, I’ve been swimming, and winning, and swimming and winning, and every time I swam I got a little bit faster. And here at the conference championship I was up against last year’s champion, the guy who had won the year before. In fact, he’d won the previous three years. And now this is my chance to race him, and up until now we had never had a chance to compete. So I was determined I’m going to beat this guy.

Brad Powell: 2:29

We’re at the blocks, the starter has his gun. You know they have a blank gun that they shoot. He goes, take your marks and we all bend over. I’m just sitting there going. I’m going to beat this guy. I’m going to beat this guy. I’m going to beat this guy and going to beat this guy. I’m going to beat this guy, and all of a sudden he takes off and then the gun goes off and about three or four of us, including me, all jumped. We all dove in the water and if you dive in the water it doesn’t matter whether you went before or after the gun goes off, but if somebody jumps like this, you all get a count of jumping the gun. So the good news is you get two tries. So we got called back, got back up on the blocks, starters there again saying take your marks, I’m bending over, I’m going, I’m going to beat this guy, I’m going to beat this guy. And the guy next to me, he moved his hands sideways like this, but he didn’t go. And, out of my peripheral vision, I saw that movement and I said go. And I, just off the block and I all by myself, soared out over the water and I thought, oh no, this is it. And I dove in and I had jumped twice, which meant I was disqualified, which meant that I wasn’t even going to get to race this guy. Not only did I lose, but I didn’t even get to compete. It was so frustrating. It was awful I didn’t win that race.

Brad Powell: 3:52

Big lesson here is don’t pay attention to what your competition is up to. Pay attention to what you can do in your own race. This was like something I had to learn. Let’s apply this to business, and I was listening to a podcast just a couple of weeks ago and this marketer who’s had a long, successful career his name is Rory Sutherland and he was talking about something that he calls reverse benchmarking. Now in the marketing world, there’s this term, benchmarking that most marketing agencies use when they go out and study the marketplace and they benchmark what the competition, what the rest of the marketplace is doing, and the strategy is to find out what are the best practices and what are things that people are doing really, really well that have made all the difference in their business. And then, of course, you take that data and you apply it to your own business and you follow what they’re doing.

Brad Powell: 4:54

And he was saying look, this is all backwards. You really don’t want to be copying your competitors, because if you do, all you’re doing is becoming just like them. And the more everybody becomes just like everybody else, the less people will be able to stand out and be distinctive and be noticed by whoever it is that they’re wanting to be noticed by. I think in the online world, this happens all the time. I mean, we’re constantly bombarded with messages with most of the bigger influencers, people like Alex Hermosi, who’s telling us what to do and how to do it and so on, and everybody wants to be like Alex. You don’t want to be like Alex. Like, no matter how good his advice might seem, being just like him isn’t going to get you anywhere. You’re just going to be usually a lesser version of what he is, which is not a way to win the game. So reverse benchmarking is basically looking for things that your competitors aren’t doing well and paying attention to that.

Brad Powell: 5:58

And he was telling the story of how this one agency went on a research project for a client and the client was a restaurant, and so they went around to other five-star restaurants to see how those five-star restaurants do their thing. And so they’re being served and, of course, it’s a five-star restaurant, the meal is great, the service is really good and people are going, wow, that was pretty fantastic. And they’re all sort of writing down all the really good things that happened. But it turned out that the one thing that they didn’t do very well was there were a couple of people in the party who, instead of wanting wine, they asked for beer, and they were kind of treated like third class citizens. It’s like, okay, well, we have this one beer. You can have that and you know, totally different from if you ask for wine. The waiter would start recommending particular wines that would go with the particular meal that you served, and so on. And the beer drinkers? They got none of that. So the recommendation to this restaurant client was lean into what you can do for the people who come into your restaurant who prefer to drink beer and serve them as well as the people who prefer to drink wine, so that now when someone asks for beer, you actually have a menu for beers that’s as healthy as the menu for wine and you educate your staff so that they can do beer pairings with particular items on the menu. That’s going to position you as something completely unique for that population, and so all of the people of which there are many who love their beer, who want to learn all about the best kind of craft beer and all the nuances of how to pair beer with a meal, treat them well in a place where no one else is doing that, and that will make you a leader in your space. This is the whole idea behind reverse benchmarking.

Brad Powell: 8:00

I wanted to take this and apply it to my own business and I looked out at my marketplace, which is helping people make video, in particular, short form video, and when I go on YouTube and I go online, there’s, I don’t know, tens of thousands of people I have YouTube channels teaching people how to make video. There’s a lot of it. So, in terms of the how-to world like do you use your phone, do you use a camera? What kind of camera, what kind of lighting? All that kind of stuff Like that information is all over the place, and so there’s really not much room for somebody to get up and say, okay, here I’m going to show you how to do that too.

Brad Powell: 8:46

However, there is a group that’s being underserved and this is who I decided to start serving, which is the people who they don’t really want to learn how to do video. They don’t want to make the video themselves. What they do want is they want to be the face of their brand. They understand that growing their personal brand has tremendous value for their business, and they just don’t have a lot of time to spend creating, posting, publishing and so forth on social media. They don’t want to do all of that. They’re too busy doing their business to have the time to have that happen.

Brad Powell: 9:20

So my service is allowing them to do this in this super time, efficient way, where, number one, they don’t need to know anything about video. Number two, they don’t even necessarily have to be a great speaker. And number three, they don’t have to take a lot of time. So I sit down and I do an interview with my clients and we just spend one hour, and we only do this once a month and so in an hour I sit there and we have this conversation and I’m pulling out their insights and I’m pulling out their stories and I’m helping them sound articulate and professional and look and sound good, because when I do it in person I use my very best cameras and then I take that footage and I edit it into short, concise, clear, what I call mic drop moments and then for them I schedule and publish it across all their social channels. So after just one hour they’ll get more than a month of social media content. And with some clients, I’ll work with their team and I’ll interview three of their people, let’s say, and after three one-hour interviews we’ll end up with enough content for four to six months of social media posting. With that kind of client, I’m only meeting with them two, maybe three times a year at the most, which for them is super time efficient, and their whole team is getting this personal brand visibility and they’re standing out. And they’re standing out in part because I’m helping them do their own reverse benchmarking with their messaging to talk about things that their competitors aren’t talking about. So take a look and see how you can start applying this in your business.

Brad Powell: 11:07

What are your competitors not doing that you could lean into and do really well? And to finish my swimming story, even though I lost that race, our team did win the conference championship. So that was one happy ending. But then, when I went home for the summer, I joined a local swimming club. I started swimming double workouts all summer long. I probably trained harder than I ever had in my life I ever had in my life. And then the following season, instead of thinking about my competition, I set a goal that was every time I swim, I’m going to do a personal best time. I’m only going to focus on what I’m doing and I’m only going to care whether I hit my goal of doing a personal best time. I’m not even going to worry about whether I win or lose and what did happen. I’m not even going to worry about whether I win or lose. And what did happen? Every time I swam that whole second year, I swam faster than I ever had before in my life. I did a lifetime best and I won every single race, including the conference championship. Right, that’s a little bit about what’s possible when you stop worrying about the competition.

Brad Powell: 12:22

And if you want to stop worrying about your competition and get your message out there and become the face of your brand and do it on video, let’s have a conversation about how you can get started with your own Mic Drop Moments, just go to mymicdropmomentscom Drop Moments.

Brad Powell: 12:41

Just go to mymicdropmomentscom and you can learn all about the program and schedule a time to talk with me to see if we’re a good fit to work together and I’ll see you next time.

Brad Powell: 12:48

So long, though, you don’t just listen to this and go away and not actually do anything, it’s time to take action. If you’re ready to elevate your business with video content that will do the selling for you, I want to invite you to a free video brand assessment where we’ll walk through your current strategy, see where you’re at and help you identify the video content that will drive more sales for your business. All you need to do is click the link in the show notes to schedule your free assessment, and together we’ll set you up for success. Don’t miss out on this chance to transform your business with the right video strategy. And that’s it for today’s episode of the Standout Business Show. Thanks for listening. If you found this episode helpful, don’t forget to subscribe and share it with a friend, because the number one way that people find out about a podcast like this one is because they heard about it from one of their friends. Remember, keep making a bigger difference by doing business differently, and until next time, so long.