What have you recently ‘disrupted’ or seen ‘disrupted’ ? smallbusiness

I feel that there are a ton of well-established businesses that are prime for disruption in my area.

What I mean by disruption is that there are businesses which rely solely on their past relationships and referrals (which I of course admit are the very reason why they are successful in the market), but they are prime for disruption because they don’t have any ‘modern’ marketing to garner new customers/clients. By simply creating a competitor to these businesses, putting some modern business marketing around the business/brand and running the business in a more ‘streamlined’ way, you can effectively draw the market share away from the ‘long established’ players in the market and build a new business really fast.

For example, I have seen a residential/commercial painting company effectively ‘steal’ the market through their outward marketing/branding by wrapping a few trucks in a very modern and ‘fun’ painting theme and creating a very ‘quick and easy’ website which allows for accurate and fast quotes. They aggressively marketed their new company to all the local general contractors - of which some gave them a try and the business took off from there. I feel the outward marketing and website really helped to ‘win’ the market. Instead of a plain white van with small/minimal name on the truck, they went ‘all out’ to push their brand/image on the market. Residential clients took notice of the nice vans/trucks and decided to give them a call directly for services. Before you know it, they grow in size and have more and more trucks and business.

I have also seen this in the restaurant kitchen cleaning/maintenance business. Most restaurants need a service company to keep their ovens, stoves, refrigerators, dishwashers, etc in working order and clean condition. Historically there are small companies who have a few workers that service the equipment and clean certain machines, etc. In comes the disruptor - one company chose to ‘brand itself’ as a bigger player in the market. They wrapped their trucks with all the services they provide, made themselves look like the best in the business. Instead of plain/unmarked vans doing the job, now their trucks are everywhere and more and more restaurants are ditching their current vendor for this new company because they do things more streamlined and just ‘act’ more professional.

I’ve seen fire suppression companies doing the same. Instead of a plain/unmarked van selling and servicing fire extinguishers and testing services (which in the past were done by relationships), now there are a few new guys doing it with larger ‘branded’ fleets of vehicles and a more modern approach to managing the relationship between vendor and client - they ‘win’ the business from the market.

All these examples are somewhat general, but I have relationships with each of the three in some way (either I know the owners of the company or know a business owner who has been affected by one of the disrupters).

So I’d like to hear more stories of local business disruption. What have you seen? We all know Uber/AirBNB at the large-scale level, but what is happening more locally in your area?

Submitted January 13, 2018 at 05:04PM by rdjat15 http://ift.tt/2DrdNZP smallbusiness