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How does a company grow from being a small, family-owned operation to having 20,000 employees and sales of $2.8 billion?

It’s all because of the acronym, USP. It stands for “Unique Selling Proposition” and all successful organizations take the time to carefully craft and fine tune their USP so that tangible and intangible qualities of the product make it clearly stand out from the competition.

Too many companies try to be like each other, and offer nothing unique to set them apart. In the clutter of the marketplace, the most well known and the least expensive tend to win out.

Many products and services are commodities today. In a mature marketplace, the companies that succeed focus on their USP. It starts by doing research. It starts by listening to clients to see what they want.

In the late 1960s Frank Perdue was struggling to grow his business and his profit margins. He raised chickens. Once he made the decision to cut out the distributor (middleman), and sell chickens directly to grocery stores and butcher shops, he set out on the road.

Frank spent six months traveling. Unlike most of his competitors, he didn’t hit the road selling. While Frank knew in his heart that his chickens were better than those raised by his competitors, he needed verification and validation. He went out and listened to his clients, past, present and future. He asked them what qualities were important in the chickens they sold.

The responses varied widely. He heard they wanted yellow chickens, so Frank fed the chickens a grain that gave the meat a golden hue. Butchers didn’t like the little golden hairs left on the wings after the plucking was finished, so Frank’s engineers developed a torch that would singe the hairs off. His clients wanted more white meat, so Frank cross-bred chickens to give them the desired results.

Each item on the list represented an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity meant more sales. It also meant better relationships. The challenge was that each item would take valuable resources, including time, money and would mean forgoing other opportunities. The end result was that Frank could not only sell more chickens, he could sell those chickens at a higher price. He just didn’t believe that his chickens were better; he bad done research and acted upon what he heard.

The Harvard Business Review published a fascinating article on a restaurant chain many know around the country: Outback Steakhouse.

There are lessons from Outback Steakhouse for every business, beginning with the phrase used most often in television advertising: No Rules, Just Right.

Outback has developed a set of core values early on called “principles and beliefs” that establish a firm foundation for the company to build upon. At first, the founders let individual stores adopt the principles as they saw the need, but when the business began to “wobble” through growth it became mandatory for every store to embrace what was found to be working at the successful stores. The lesson learned is that successful organizations have core values, and they must be embraced and enforced at every level.

One of the more interesting tidbits about the company is that each of the four founders worked at menial jobs for previous employers before starting Outback. They washed dishes, bussed tables, cooked, waited tables, tended bar and swept the floor. Based on this experience, they wanted to create a business where the people at every level were heard, respected and had room for advancement.

Unlike most service businesses with multiple locations, managers at Outback are part owners. Ignoring the fad to grant stock to employees so they would act more like owners, Outback takes a different slant.

Managers become part owners by investing $25,000 of their own money to demonstrate they are serious about ownership. Signing a five-year contract is mandatory, because the founders want people as partners who are in it for the long term. Managers are granted 1,000 shares of stock, which, at the end of five years, will be worth an estimated $100,000. In terms of salary and short term bonuses, a typical manager will earn more than $10,000 a month in compensation. This figure includes l0 percent of cash flow for the restaurant they manage.

Rather than using a traditional “command and control” system so often found at multi-unit businesses, Outback wants decisions, particularly those related to human resources, addressed at the local level.

With rare exception, Outback doesn’t do lunch. This was not an easy decision to come to, because most restaurant chains see empty tables, a vacant bar and an idle kitchen as wasted resources … resources that could generate money.

Outback took a second look to uncover hidden costs of doing lunch, particularly as it related to human capital.

The single largest cost in operating a restaurant is the cost of labor. The cost benefit of having servers work two shifts, hiring, supervising and administering the cost of additional personnel to serve lunch did not make economic sense.

Rather, Outback realized that dinner was the equivalent of “show time” in the restaurant business, when customers would come in and want to be served by energetic, enthusiastic people who were eager to serve.

The lesson for every organization is that in the end, it is all about people. The company trusts people to do the right thing, every day, regardless of the fact that they are dealing with suppliers, partners, customers, employees or the community. It is truly an American success story.

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