Every Business Needs a Single Idea

“We reinvented how consultants get to work.”

If your company is founded on a single idea that either cannot be expressed or has not yet been expressed, that’s a problem. If you can’t express it, then it is not really an idea. And although you may have a company, you may not actually have a business.

That was once the fundamental issue facing my client, the ERP Consulting Exchange (ECX). However, it is very clear now what this enterprise is all about:

• Use social networks to create an affinity group of 3000+ ERP consultants by offering them low cost access to running SAP systems, career building services and paid consulting work they can do anytime from anywhere
  
  
• Offer virtual consulting to ERP customers looking for cheaper richer alternatives to traditional maintenance contracts
  
  
• Spearhead the virtual consulting effort with an elite team-within-a-team; then brand it as the model of an enterprise-size version

This “SAP Helpdesk in the Cloud” project has spanned 12 months so far and multiple companies — ECX and its various partners. Just word smithing a tagline alone wasn’t enough. The campaign worked by embedding this theme day-to-day throughout a variety of activities, including websites, blogs, newsletters, videos, slide decks, online consultant database, a resume writing service and more.


Maintaining a single clear informing idea of what a business is all about is harder than coming up with the original idea -- no easy task in itself -- and just as critical.

Otherwise, what became the first-ever cloud-based SAP helpdesk could as easily have become just another social network full of retreaded content.