The 97 › Strategy 30 › Week 8
The point
A performance gap is the distance between what an activity produces for you and what the identical activity produces for the best operator doing it. Same activity, same investment of time and money, different outcome.
I want to be precise about why this matters more than it sounds. If your salesperson closes at eighteen percent and the best in your industry closes at thirty-four, you are not eighteen percent behind. You are running the entire cost of your sales operation — the salaries, the leads, the time, the premises — and getting roughly half the return on it. The cost is identical. The yield is halved. Nobody invoices you for the difference, which is precisely why it goes unexamined for years.
The same gap exists in every repeated activity: your advertising against the best in your category, your follow-up, your quotation, your onboarding, your hiring.
And here is what makes it the most useful item on the list — closing a performance gap requires no new spend at all. You are already running the activity. You are already paying for it. The only thing that changes is how well it is being done.
The mistake almost everyone makes
Benchmarking against competitors. Everybody in an industry converges on the same mediocre number and calls it the standard. The genuinely superior process for almost anything you do already exists in a different field, invisible to your market because nobody looks sideways.
The test: Which industry has your problem in a more extreme form? Whoever operates under the greatest pressure has been forced to solve it best.
| Who | What happened |
|---|---|
| The same everything | Jay's own framing: identical inputs, identical spend, and a result that differs by a multiple. The variable is competence, not budget. |
| Airlines on scheduling | Extreme pressure on perishable capacity produced the discipline everyone else borrows. |
| Hotels on pricing | Revenue management exists because a room unsold at 6pm is worth nothing at 6:01. |
| Emergency medicine on triage | The best prioritisation systems in the world, developed where getting it wrong is fatal. |
| Direct response on testing | A discipline that measures everything because it has always had to pay for being wrong. |
| Your own best month | Somewhere in your records is your best campaign. Most owners call it luck. Something was being done differently and nobody wrote it down. |
| Asking the ones who left | Uncomfortable, and by a distance the most accurate — they have seen both operations from inside and have no reason to flatter either. |
| A B2B firm | Adopted an airline's overbooking logic for consultant scheduling and recovered a fifth of previously idle capacity. |
This week
Choose one repeated activity — the one with the highest volume — and answer two questions honestly. What does it produce for us, as a number? And what is the best number anybody gets from the same activity, in any industry?
Then send a short message to five buyers who left you, asking what the firm they moved to does better.
They will tell you things you will not enjoy, and every one is a specific description of a competitor's process, given free.