Everyone has a wake up routine, I find that physical activity gets me going. I’m an early riser – I go to the gym in the morning to perk myself up and prepare for the day. So this morning, rolled out of bed bright and early and noticed sunny South Florida waking up: large, curly-tailed lizards creeping out to bake in the sun, drivers slamming shut their doors to miss the traffic (a few asleep at the wheel), a few (surprise) early birds… Everyone and everything just waking up and heading to work.
As I continued on my way to start my morning ritual, I counted the number of people buying coffee on their way to work (no this is not a pitch to promote the coffee craze). Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, Gas Stations, McD’s, 7-Eleven… The drive through lines were at the max. It’s been that way for decades – in fact, prior to Howard Schulz coming up with the idea for Starbucks in the 70’s, the coffee market was already very saturated! You could get a cup of coffee, to-go, on any corner for the cost of coins. Gas stations, convenience stores and restaurants all offered coffee at ¼ of the price that it’s sold for today! It just wasn’t logical to think that a company could start selling a product for 4 times the price in an overly saturated market and plan to succeed!
Not to Howard Schulz: he believed in the impossible; he saw a REASON why people would pay for the experience of having a comfortable place to go, work, socialize and enjoy their coffee. And he was right! Today, Starbucks is a $13 billion company with over 20,000 stores in 62 countries! Dunkin Donuts was struggling when Starbucks was starting to peak, and again in a feat of impossibility, Dunkin Donuts was able to fight back! Dunkin used a simple phrase and strategic marketing to start branding their coffee “America runs on Dunkin!” They started breaking records at a whole new level in the coffee business, again despite an oversaturated market!
The point? Market saturation is a myth. Each level of success within a product category creates a new opportunity for growth in that category. Who would have guessed that Amazon could turn a $5 billion market for books into a business worth $61,000,000,000 (Yes, that’s NINE zeroes… and over 12x growth)? Barnes and Noble had a corner in the market prior to Amazon, and no one would have predicted that another company could ever compete! And let’s not forget THEIR partnership with Starbucks.
While Americans needs many coffee shops, you individually only need the ONE coffee shop to get your favorite brand. You don’t need all of them. What if you were surrounded by coffee shops, and they were buying out your favorite grocery stores, preferred auto repair shops, home improvement stores, dealerships, etc…?
That would be a complete mess – you might stop drinking coffee altogether! Your filing cabinets, whether there physically in your office, at a storage facility, hidden deep in your Microsoft file folders or even (Buzzword warning) in a “CLOUD” have created a marketplace that’s saturated on a unilateral level: literally oversaturating YOU with replicas of space-stealing, clutter-creating, useless mumbo jumbo. Your document duplicates after useless email copies do not have the same functionality as Starbucks. And so, your multitude of replicates of the same document have taken over your business without you even knowing it.
5i Solutions Content Management allows businesses to shed the inefficiency, file duplication, and unorganized file management. You could handle this saturation when you had one filing cabinet or 2 employees accessing your network folders but you have grown since then, and outgrown this legacy of “Don’t Delete It, Repeat It!” style of content management solutions. Don’t let your document storage prevent your company’s growth. Manage them; don’t just store them, its holding you back and I can help.
