"Strategy 101 is about choices: You can't be all things to all people" - Michael Porter
                                                     

A successful business strategy, like many things in life, involves trade offs.
For example, being big will give you economies of scale but you will loose your ability to respond quickly.

Being cheap will win you customers but often at the expense of customer service and or quality.

Trying to meet the needs of all market segments broadens your potential customer base but will limit your ability to develop specialist knowledge.

The simple fact of the matter is that no business can be good at all things at the same time. The good news is that most customers don't actually need their suppliers to be good at everything. Let's face it, you only really need your suppliers to be good at the things that matter to YOU.

In reality our competition are not actually getting it wrong per se, it is just that they do not specialise in what we do. The largest market for outsourced warehousing is the online business to consumer market. There are countless thousands of businesses selling goods to the public over the web. It's a very big lucrative market and this tempts almost all out sourced warehousing organisations to gear themselves to meet the needs of this market segment.

But servicing the B2C e-tailer market requires a fundamentally different approach to serving the B2B market in which we specialise. We think that it is impossible to have a viable business that does both really well. We know that by trying to service both markets our competitors inhibit their ability to offer the superior levels of service the B2B market demands.

So how does TFL get it right?