One aspect of ClearSpace we don’t talk about enough is that we aren’t full-time employees. We work full-time hours, or more, but we aren’t full-time employees. We certainly don’t hide this fact but I’m not sure we focus on it enough as a uniqueness and strength. In some ways our offering directly competes with teams of full-time employees. We offer a viable alternative to staffed developers, you can hire your own staff of developers, architects, etc or you can bring us in. As well, we augment existing teams.

Anytime you identify your competition it’s difficult not to think about what they’re doing. In doing so you can drift into emulating them. It’s like a high school dance. You suck, have no clue how to dance, so you watch that other guy who’s got some moves. Before you know it you’re doing a sad imitation of rolling up the garden hose.

The obvious problem is that in trying to compete with the other choice we make ourselves indistinguishable from them. In those fine, gray line situations we should be doing the opposite, that is focus and highlight what makes us unique not what makes us alike.

We allow our clients to start projects today, not months from now when they’ve hired a team. We allow our clients the flexibility to grow and shrink their teams as their business needs change. They’re able to slow development for a few months while they raise funds, perform research, negiotiate a deal, without having to pay a team of developers.

I guess I’m just agreeing with what my mom always told me, be yourself, be unique. Ok, my mother never said that but I think I’ve seen a mother in a movie say it.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 12th, 2006 at 2:18 pm and is filed under Office Gossip. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.