When you create a Market Dominating Position (MDP) you’re on track to successfully scale your business. I discuss how to do that with my guest, Ed Middlebrooks.

Ed is not your typical business coach—he’s a strategic weapon for entrepreneurs who are done playing small. Ed Middlebrooks is the founder of Elite Profit Coach, where he works with driven business owners to uncover hidden profit, outmaneuver competitors, and install dominance into their markets.

 



Ed was the kid in the server closet for 25 years working a job in IT services. That job got him involved with business planning. He realized that technology affects the growth of a business. He found himself interfacing with high-level executives about more than just small technology issues. Ed began asking “How does the infrastructure of the business really allow us to foster growth and increase communications which ultimately increases sales and marketing results? “
Entering the Entrepreneurship World
After 25 Ed left the corporate IT world because he learned about real estate investing and how to automate a business using what he calls “The Five Steps of Every Business”; which is:

To get customers, you must first generate leads.
Prescreen those leads.
Construct and present offers.
Close quickly.
Follow up with everybody.

Those five steps exist in so many places within a business. In his real estate investing career, his firm bought 24 houses with none of their own money, no banks and no credit. He had 17 Air BnBs. He built a multimillion-dollar business providing rentals. He took the strategies that he learned from working with C-Suite executives, negotiating and networking. Ed discovered that the secrets of growing and scaling a business appear to be fairly unique to each business, but they all come down to a singular strategy or pattern. When you put the building blocks in the right order, things happen, your strategies work, and your business grows.
The Starting Point of Marketing Strategy and Business Growth
First, you must take an analysis of your business. When it comes to growing and scaling a business, most entrepreneurs look at how to generate more revenue. They’re always thinking about the income. They want to foster more business. Whereas that’s true to a point, what Ed finds is that a lot of businesses are just chasing good money after bad. For example, they spend money on ads without really understanding the fundamentals of their business and how the ads boost (or don’t boost) the bottom line.

Ed has a mantra that he’s learned along the way. That is “Revenue feeds the ego, but profit feeds your family.” When he talks about growing and scaling a business, he’ll show a business how to become more profitable without spending any extra money on marketing. This is assuming that there’s already a steady flow of business coming into that company. What they can do is make some changes. They can reduce the cost of goods sold, they can look at making more compelling offers, and so on.
Creating Your Market Dominating Position (MDP)
One thing stands out above everything else. That is understanding your company’s Market Dominating Position (MDP); sometimes referred to as the Unique Selling Position. What is the MDP of your company? If you don’t have that all you’re doing is throwing money into marketing, hoping that people connect with your messaging. You’re doing what everyone else does. When you do that, you can end up stuck in a red ocean (filled with “sharks”) and you’re not in a blue ocean. Ed’s not talking about creating a product that nobody else has. He’s talking about what the capacity of your business is to provide and deliver unique and superior value amongst your competition.

Here’s another question that you must ask regardless of what your industry is.