Thinking Outside the Box and Differentiation Could be the Key to Your Business Success

This account, SB Mowing, has a massive following on TikTok (13.7M followers) and YouTube.

His schtick is to go up to houses in low-income neighbourhoods with overgrown lawns, and offers to do all the yardwork for free.

It’s satisfying for the viewer on a few levels.

1.) There’s good will;
2.) We can see the before and after process;
3.) It’s hard work;
4.) It’s differentiation

Had he just ran a mowing business like everyone else, he would likely have to knock on a hundred doors before someone agrees to hire him, then he may charge $250 – $500 dollars per job.

Instead, he does the mowing for free and gets 50M views (4M likes) on one video! That video alone likely brought him in thousands of dollars for that same job and thousands of new subscribers.

What’s my point?

What if you filmed your business doing cold calls where you talk to startups and offer to do some work for free (cybersecurity, design, automation, reporting…).

You film the work (what you can show and what’s visually interesting).

Add a voice over where you are talking about your process, or why you like to do this work, the risks of not doing it, especially for a small business…

That could be another viable series for your social media.

Granted:

👉 It’s a lot of work
👉 There’s no guarantee of a payoff
👉 There’s no TikTok Creator Fund in Canada 🍁
👉 You could devalue your businesses by being seen as the company that works for free
👉 It may not be as satisfying as a start to finish mowing video

BUT…

I post this to perhaps get you thinking about your business in different ways. Maybe it’s not this idea, but it could be something like this.

“What if we did the opposite of what everyone else is doing and looked for a completely different monetary path than we are currently pursuing?”

Food for thought.