Page 136 - Paulisms: Gold Nuggets for Small Business

even registered one competitor’s domain name. I went hell for leather to get Solatube out there nationally within 12 months. A zillion Home Shows, national TV, distribution nationwide, newspaper ads and PR. Remember, there was no internet then. Bang, we created a generic brand. We controlled the price and margin. Solatube was a game changer in the skylight market and architectural design.
So, competition started arriving. They copied our product. ThSo, competition started arriving. They copied our product. They bagged us and said they were the best. They said they were cheaper than us.. We just had to keep going the way we were, pushing hard and working on our USP (Unique Selling Proposition). In the time between our launch and two years later, four products came into the market. Three went within the first year and one more fell off after ten years. They didn’t realise that it was the way we were operating that was the key, not the product!
You have to back yourself against competition and control your margin – don’t drop your price. Ensure your systems are sharp and keep pushing.
Today, twenty-six years later, Solatube is still the No. 1 product in NZ and growing.
You also need to look at the cost of a new entrant into the market. It costs a lot of money to take market share. That is why I moved more into other sales channels in 1995 – as the residential market matured for Solatube, I knew the cost of increasing our market penetration in that sales channel was increasing. Potentially, I could see that we would lose money on increased sales in view of the cost of lead generation.
I had been exposed to Wasson’s Product Life Cycle. The theory is that as a market matures, competition would come in time. We were only in the residential sales channel and it forewarned me to go into other market channels; for example, trade and architects’ channels. The competitors did