How much of your business is actually standard vs genuinely unique?

Most businesses are mostly standard and partly unique. The standard parts — accounting, email, payroll — should run on off-the-shelf tools. The unique part — the specific operation that runs your business and sets you apart — is where custom pays off. Getting software right is mostly about telling the two apart, because spending in the wrong place is what quietly wastes money on both sides.

What does "standard" look like?

Standard functions are the ones nearly every business has and does roughly the same way: keeping the books, sending email, paying staff, storing files, basic scheduling. There's no advantage in doing these differently, and excellent, cheap products already exist because millions of businesses need the same thing.

The test for standard is honesty about advantage. Does any customer choose you because of how you do your bookkeeping? Almost certainly not. Nobody wins business on payroll. These functions have to be done well, but "well" here means "reliably and cheaply," which is exactly what a mature off-the-shelf product delivers. Buy them, and spend your attention elsewhere.

What does "unique" look like?

Your unique part is the chain of steps that is specifically yours — how you take and fulfil orders, schedule and run jobs, manage the particular thing your customers come to you for. It's usually multi-step, often a genuine advantage, and rarely fits a generic product.

Unique doesn't mean strange or complicated for its own sake. It means the way you deliver value is particular to you, and changing it to suit a generic tool would flatten something worth keeping. A studio that enrols by term, a retailer running sale and hire and made-to-order together, a multi-site operator who needs one view across locations — none of these are exotic, but each is specific enough that off-the-shelf can only get part of the way. This is where a system built to fit changes the economics.

What are the two classic mistakes?

Over-building is spending custom money to reinvent standard functions you could have bought. It happens when a business falls in love with control and builds its own version of something excellent that already exists — an expensive way to end up with a worse accounting package. The rule holds: don't build what you can buy.

Over-forcing is the opposite and far more common: cramming your unique operation into a generic tool because it was cheaper up front, and paying for it forever in workarounds, double entry and spreadsheets. The generic tool never quite fits, so a layer of manual effort grows around it to fill the gap.

Smart businesses avoid both. Buy the standard, build the unique, and don't let the cheapness of one tempt you into the wrong side of the line.

How do I sort my own business?

Walk through your operation, step by step, and label each part with one question: does every business in the world do this roughly the same way (standard), or is this specific to how we work (unique)?

• •The standard list is your shopping list — the functions to buy off the shelf.
• •The unique list is where custom earns its place — the operation worth building around.

Do it at the level of actual steps, not departments. "Sales" isn't standard or unique as a whole; sending a quote might be standard, while the particular way you configure a made-to-order job is unique. The finer the grain, the more useful the sort.

Why is this hard to do from the inside?

This sorting is easy to get wrong from the inside, because everything feels a bit unique when it's yours. You know the reasons behind every quirk, so every step seems special. From the outside, a lot of what feels distinctive is just familiar — a slightly different label on a standard process — while the genuinely unique part is sometimes so ingrained you barely notice it.

That's why a fresh pair of eyes helps. Mapping your operation with someone who has seen many businesses separates the genuinely distinctive from the merely familiar, and points your money where it actually counts: buying the standard, building the unique.

Related reading

• •"There's an app for that" — except when there isn't
• •Build, buy, or configure: the three ways to get business software
• •Off-the-shelf vs custom software: how to actually decide
• •Part of our guide to custom vs off-the-shelf software for Australian businesses.

The honest first step

Mapping your operation with fresh eyes separates the genuinely distinctive from the merely familiar — and points your money in the right direction. The value is in what we find: usually, that you can buy more than you thought, and build less than you feared, as long as you build the right part.

Tell us what you run, and we'll show you what's possible.