by Sarah Duncan

If a stranger cornered you at a barbecue right now and asked what makes your business different from every other business doing roughly the same thing… could you answer in one sentence? Without sweating? Without resorting to "ummm we're really passionate about what we do"?

If you hesitated, welcome, you're among friends. Most business owners can't clearly articulate what makes them different, and it's costing them way more than they realise.

And in a world that's noisier than a kid with a recorder, that's a pretty big problem.

As they say, you could be the absolute best at what you do, but if no one knows you exist (or worse, no one can tell why you're different from Brenda down the road who does the same thing), you're not making the impact you could be making.

So, how do we fix that? Introducing your unfair advantage.

Why your USP isn't cutting it anymore

You've probably heard of a USP, a Unique Selling Proposition. The thing that's supposed to set you apart.

But here's the issue: USPs are usually one-dimensional and snore-inducing. "We have the lowest prices." "We offer the fastest service." "We have the best customer support." Great, love that for you. But so does literally everyone else's business.

Boring. Forgettable. And worst of all? Easy to copy.

The minute someone undercuts your price or matches your service speed, your USP becomes as flaky as a service station sausage roll. You're back to square one, scrambling for what makes you different.

That's why we don't talk about USPs in our Business Growth Network. We talk about your unfair advantage, and there's a big difference. 

What is an unfair advantage?

Your unfair advantage is the combination of everything that makes you, you. It's not just what you sell or how you sell it. It's:

• Your story: where you've been, what you've lived through, the questionable decisions you made in your 20s that taught you something useful
• Your lived experience: the things you've done that no one else has done in quite the same way
• Your skill stack: the unique combination of skills you've collected over time (more on this in a sec)
• Your personality: the way you show up, the way you communicate
• Your relationships: the people, communities, and connections you've built along the way

When you stack all of that together, you create something that literally cannot be copied. Because no one else has lived your exact life, in your exact way, with your exact combination of skills, stories and oddly specific obsessions.

That's your unfair advantage. And it's gold.

The power of skill stacking

Steven Bartlett (yes, the Diary of a CEO guy) talks about this concept a lot. The idea is simple: you don't need to be the BEST in the world at one thing. You just need to be really good at a few things that, when combined, make you uniquely valuable.

Here's a real example. One half of Collabsolutely, Jacquie, is an accountant with over 20 years in finance, tax and wealth creation. Pretty common, right? You can't throw a rock without hitting an accountant.

BUT at 14 years old, she was teaching herself HTML and CSS, building Blink-182 fan websites on dial-up internet. (For our younger readers: dial-up was terribly slow and a single image took roughly the length of a movie to load.) Fast forward 20+ years, and she's now building tech platforms and apps as part of our business.

That combo of finance brain + tech-savvy + decades of experience + the patience of a saint thanks to dial-up trauma? Not common. Not easy to copy. That's an unfair advantage.

What's yours? What weird, wonderful dots can you connect that no one else has?

Why this matters (and why most people get it wrong)

Here's a stat that should make you sit up: according to Havas Meaningful Brands report 77% of brands could disappear tomorrow and no one would notice.

If you stopped posting, stopped showing up, stopped existing, would your audience actually notice? Or would they just keep scrolling past where you used to be, blissfully unaware that you've gone full off-grid hermit?

Brutal? Yes. True? Also yes.

This is exactly why leaning into your unfair advantage isn't optional. It's the thing that makes you memorable. It's the thing that makes you missed when you're not there. It's the thing that builds genuine connection with the people who are meant to work with you.

And too many business owners skip this step entirely. They jump straight to "I want to create a product!" or "I want to build something!", without ever stopping to ask: Who is this for? Why me? What makes me the obvious choice over Brenda? No offense, Brenda.

When you don't have clarity on your unfair advantage, your marketing falls flat. Your messaging doesn't land. Your content blends into the noise like the endless white paint swatches at Bunnings. And you end up wondering why you're working so hard for so little traction.

How to find your unfair advantage: 4 questions to ask yourself

1. What's the backstory that led you here?

Don't skip this. We see you trying to skip it. Come back.

Your story matters more than you think. Where did you grow up? What experiences shaped you? What pivotal moments led you to start this business? The threads of your past are usually woven into your unfair advantage. Even the embarrassing bits. Especially the embarrassing bits.

2. What skills have you "stacked" over the years?

Make a list of every skill you've picked up, even the ones that feel completely unrelated to your current business. Hospitality? Sales? Teaching? Coding? Parenting? Competitive trampolining? All of it counts.

Look for unexpected combinations. The weirder the combo, the more uniquely you it is.

3. What do people always come to YOU for?

Pay attention to what your friends, family, and clients consistently ask you about. What problems do people instinctively bring to you? What are you the "person to call" for? That's a massive clue.

4. What part of your story feels too personal to share?

This is where the gold usually is. The thing you're slightly nervous to put out there? The vulnerable bit? The "people might judge me" part? That's often the most powerful piece of your unfair advantage.

Because vulnerability builds connection, and connection builds business. Nobody ever connected deeply with someone whose entire personality is "I'm a business owner". We need more.

What happens when you nail it

When you get clear on your unfair advantage, everything else gets easier:

• Your content connects. Because you're speaking from a place of authenticity, not just regurgitating ChatGPT advice.
• Your dream clients find you. Because they recognise themselves in your story and go "OH. SHE GETS IT."
• You stop competing on price. Because no one can offer what you offer. 
• You own a segment of the market. A segment that's uniquely yours, hard to copy, and easy to defend.
• You build genuine trust. Because people buy from people, not from faceless businesses with stock photos.

It's the difference between shouting into the void and actually being heard.

Our own unfair advantage (because we're not about to tell you to do something we don't do)

Want a real-life example? Here's ours.

We've been best friends for over 30 years. Childhood besties. We're talking matching school uniforms, sleepovers, the works. 

One of us is a finance and wealth creation expert (Jacquie, the numbers girl). The other is a marketing and digital strategy nerd (me, Sarah, the words girl). Together, we've built Collabsolutely, a business built to support entrepreneurs with money, marketing and mindset.

That 30-year friendship? Not replicable. The complementary skill set? Hard to find. The fact that we've watched each other grow up, make questionable fashion choices, and figure things out across decades? That's not something you can fake.

So we lean into it. Hard. We talk about it, share the photos (cringe and all), tell the stories. Because it's part of what makes us us, and it's part of why people choose to work with us instead of someone else.

Your turn (yes, you)

Sit down this week and work through those four questions above. Don't rush it. Don't dismiss anything as "not relevant." Don't tell yourself your story is "boring." (It's not. You're just too close to it.)

Write it all down and start looking for the patterns. Your unfair advantage is in there. We pinky promise.

And if you're sitting there going, "I've tried this and I still can't see it", you're not alone. It's genuinely hard to see your own brilliance. That's where having a community, or two business besties comes in handy. We help business owners do this all the time inside our Business Growth Network, because sometimes you need an outside perspective to spot the magic that's been there all along.

Want more of this? Tune into our podcast, where we talk all things money, marketing and mindset for entrepreneurs who know business is better together. New episodes fortnightly. Bring snacks.