What makes a business stand out

An earlier version of this appeared on rework.com.

What makes your business stand out?

Leaders everywhere keep asking this. It doesn’t matter if you are bootstrapping in a garage, scaling a Series B, or running a Fortune 500. The question never goes out of fashion.

Globalization is now the default. You can work from anywhere, get paid instantly, and compete on a global stage. Access has never been easier.

But competition is the default too. The world is one big market now. Every employee competes with people from anywhere, and many of them are hungry.

So what makes a business stand out?

The product? Maybe. We should have something unique. The people? Could be, since people build and sell. Capital? Without it, you can’t produce.

None of these answers are wrong. But none of them are the root.

Products change from day one. People change too. Even co-founders leave, and you yourself change over time. Capital and business models shift all the time.

I think the answer is how a business uses time. In other words, speed of execution. Only time is limited, and only time is granted.

If your model isn’t good enough, you fail. That’s fine. The real problem is failing too late, after it has become costly and you have missed other chances.

If your model is good, the challenge is how fast you can ship it. Somewhere else, someone is working on the same thing.

Both paths lead to the same place. Speed matters.

Yet in most businesses, speed is messy and nobody controls it. So the question I keep coming back to is simple. How quickly can we get things done? And can we measure it?