Nobody can tell you apart

A machine shop off Amnicola Highway in Chattanooga, half past three, second shift stacking their coolers by the door. Taped to the wall beside the office phone was a capabilities sheet. One page, corners curled and gone brown, a fax number across the bottom. Equipment list, tolerances held, materials run.

I asked when it was printed. He guessed nine years back, maybe further. Then he said the thing he would say twice more before I left. That buyer at the OEM is impossible.

Twenty-two people, five mills, three lathes, thirty-one years in the same building. The buyer he could not stand was a third of his revenue and had asked for another price concession the quarter before. He gave it. Months later he was still angry about it.

The only question anybody asks you

He is a good machinist and a fair man. The shop is clean, the tooling is looked after, and he holds a tolerance most of his competition will not quote. None of that came up in the concession call. That call was about price, because price was the only thing on the table the buyer had a way to compare.

So the month goes the way it goes. Quotes leave the office. Some come back, and the ones that come back come back on price. New work arrives from people who already knew him or from people shopping four shops at once. Marketing gets his attention when the backlog thins and loses it the week the backlog fills.

A few things you would recognise:

Asked to describe the customer you want more of, you would describe a job instead. A material, a run size, a machine it fits.

Your best sentence about your company is one your two closest competitors could say word for word.

Marketing switches on when the backlog gets thin and goes quiet the week it fills up.

You could not say what the shop across town charges, what work they turn away, or who they have hired lately.

Something shifted in your customers' industry in the last two years, and a customer told you about it.

You pay for advertising every month and could not name one job it brought you.

Firing him would not have helped

Owners bring this to me as a customer problem. That account is impossible, they grind us every quarter, they play us off against a shop in Alabama. Sometimes the account really is a bad one and the owner is right to be done with it. He is usually wrong about what happens next.

Fire the account and the replacement work shows up on the same terms. New buyer, same conversation, because you still arrive as one of four shops with similar machines and a similar sheet of paper. Hire a salesman instead and he sells the undefined thing faster than you did, which brings in more price-led work and hides the problem for another two years. Spend the money on a website and a booth at the regional show and you have bought a better looking version of the capabilities sheet.

Under all three sits one sentence nobody in that building can finish. You send us this work instead of the shop across town because ____. If the ending you write is one your competitor could also write, you have no position. You have a price.

So a man decides positioning is his problem. He sits down alone for twenty minutes and writes quality, on-time delivery and service. Every word of it true in his shop. Every word of it also printed on the sheet across town, in the same order. A claim your competitor can make is a minimum standard, and buyers price minimum standards.

A buyer who cannot tell three shops apart is doing his job when he asks for the lowest number.

That call had a reason behind it, and he did not learn what it was until long after he had paid for it. The OEM had cut its own inventory and moved to smaller lots and faster turns. Every shop bidding that work was still quoting it as though the lots were the size they had always been. He was the only man within forty miles set up to run small lots profitably. He learned about the change from the purchasing department that was squeezing him for it.

What the concession cost him

The shop turns $4.2 million. That buyer is 34 percent of it, a little over $1.4 million of work. The 6 percent he handed back is $85,680 a year, and none of it came off his costs, because his costs did not move an inch. Net profit in a shop like his runs around 7 percent, call it $294,000 in a good year. One phone call took not quite a third of it.

Add the free first-article inspection he threw in two years ago to win one job, with no end date on it and no objective he could have written down. Three customers expect it now. Not one of them chose him because of it.

The ceiling in that shop sits on the selling side. The machines had hours left in them, the crew could have run more, and there was money in the account to buy steel. What the business could not do was create demand it had chosen. When you cannot select your work, your work selects you, and it selects on price. Another mill in that condition buys you more hours to sell cheaply.

Three calls, and you make them yourself

Pick three customers, and skip your three biggest. One who has bought from you for years. One who came in inside the last twelve months. One who used to send steady work and has gone quiet on you.

Call them yourself. No email, no survey link, no salesman standing in for you. Two minutes each, and the middle of a Tuesday afternoon beats a Monday morning. Say the same words to all three.

The last time you had a part that could have gone to us or to somebody else, and it came here, what made you pick us?

Then stop talking. Count to five in your head if you have to. The first answer is polite, something about good service. The answer that comes out of the silence after it is the one worth writing down.

Two follow-ups, the same two for each of them. Who else did you get a price from, and what do they tell you they are better at. And what is changing in your business over the next year that changes what you need from a shop like ours. Those two questions get you your competitors' positioning and a market shift, and they come from the only people who watch both.

Write it on one sheet of paper, by hand, three columns, in their words. Do not fix the grammar and do not summarise. The exact phrase a customer reaches for is worth more than your tidy version of it, because the next customer thinks in the same words.

Friday afternoon, read down the three columns. You are looking for a word or a situation that turns up in more than one. That is what you sell. If all three give you something generic, or all three say price, you have an answer too and it is a hard one. It means they buy you because you are close and cheap, and now you know what you have to build.

Then write one sentence and tape it over the capabilities sheet. We are the shop for this kind of customer who needs this specific thing. For ninety days, every dollar you spend on marketing has to name that customer, and the quotes you walk away from should be the ones that do not fit him.

One more errand, and it takes your bookkeeper half an hour. Have her write next to your last thirty invoices how each of those customers first found you. You will see quickly which of your spending is doing something. The rest has been a habit.

Where price stops being the whole conversation

Two months in, what you notice is the absence of a conversation you used to have every week. Quotes stop coming back as pure price arguments, and a few come back with a question about lead time or tolerance instead. Your estimator stops asking how low he can go. You stop hearing your customers' plans from the person squeezing you over them. You turn down a job that does not fit and drive home without the sick feeling.

What starts is slower and quieter. One or two customers begin repeating your sentence back to you, which is the first evidence it was true.

The shop off Amnicola made the three calls inside a week. Two of them said a version of the same thing: he takes the parts nobody else will program. It appeared on none of his marketing, and it was the reason both men drove work past two closer shops to get to him. He had been doing it for eleven years and had never said it out loud.

A company that knows what it is for negotiates from somewhere. Everybody else negotiates from price. You cannot be chosen for something you have never said.

Marketing and Market Position is eight statements in the Business Check-in, and this article works through six of them. The other two ask what you spend and what it brought back, which is a harder pair to answer. The check-in is free and takes about ten minutes.