Imagine a monthly subscription to the local barber shop that gets you a certain number of haircuts each month, or a weekly subscription to your favorite pizza joint where every Thursday, on pizza night, your family’s favorite pie just shows up at your door. These are two services I’d gladly pay for. But they aren’t normal services for a barber shop or a pizza joint to offer. This isn’t the  way pizza joints and barbers do business, right?

When a business within a certain industry decides to radically alter the way things have always been done since the beginning of time, it’s risky, scary, unfamiliar, and odd to us at first. It’s even more confusing to their competitors.

And then something beautiful happens. Sometimes, more often than not, that extreme & radical departure from the norm pays off. It’s not always about out-marketing your competition. It’s about doing it totally different.

If you’re stuck, maybe just getting outside the box isn’t enough, take another step.

P.S. I’ve got two tickets to see Seth Godin, Barbara Corcoran, Sally Hogshead, Jerry Greenfield and others live at  http://www.theartofsales.ca/ in Toronto on November 22, 2011. Between now and the end October, anyone who leaves a comment on the blog will be entered to win two tickets. The winner will be announced November 1, 2011.