Your Unfair Advantages - The Things Only You Can Do

We've talked about general competitive advantages — insider knowledge, credibility, network, and the rest. But now let's get more personal. What are the specific things that only you can do? The things that come from your particular combination of experiences, relationships, and knowledge?

These are your unfair advantages. They're unfair because they can't be easily replicated or purchased by someone else. They come from living a specific professional life in a specific context over a specific period of time.

If competitive advantages are the general categories (like "insider knowledge"), unfair advantages are the specific, personal instances within those categories that are unique to you. Everyone who spent a decade in healthcare has insider knowledge. But only you have your particular insider knowledge — the specific departments you worked in, the specific crises you navigated, the specific relationships you built, the specific failures you witnessed and learned from.

That specificity is what makes an advantage truly unfair.

Why "Unfair" Is the Right Word

Let's be clear about what we mean by "unfair." We're not talking about cheating or cutting corners. We're talking about advantages that other people simply cannot replicate, no matter how smart or hardworking they are.

Think of it this way. If you're a former compliance director who spent 8 years at a major pharmaceutical company, anyone can learn about pharmaceutical compliance from books and courses. But nobody can replicate the fact that you:

• Personally navigated your company through three FDA inspections
• Built relationships with specific regulators who now trust your judgment
• Watched two compliance initiatives fail and understand exactly why
• Developed informal processes that worked better than the official ones
• Trained 40 people on compliance procedures and know which parts confuse everyone

Those specific experiences? Nobody else has them. Nobody can buy them. Nobody can learn them in a weekend course. They're unfair — in the best possible way.

The Five Questions That Reveal Your Unfair Advantages

Work through these five questions carefully. Don't rush — set aside at least 45 minutes. Write your answers down in detail, not bullet points. The best answers usually come after you sit with a question for a few minutes and push past the obvious surface-level response.

Question 1: What Do People Come to You for Help With — Even Unsolicited?

Think about this carefully. Who calls you when they're stuck? What do they ask about? This isn't about your job description — it's about the organic, voluntary requests for help that come to you without you marketing yourself at all.

Maybe your former colleagues texted you about tricky client situations. Maybe people from other departments stopped by your desk to ask "quick questions" that turned into 30-minute consultations. Maybe friends who work in similar roles asked for your take on decisions they were facing.

These unsolicited requests are powerful signals because they represent genuine demand. Nobody asks for help with something they don't actually need help with. And they're choosing to ask you specifically, which means they believe you have something others don't.

Write down: The last 5-10 times someone asked you for advice or help with a professional issue. What did they ask about? What was the situation? Why do you think they came to you specifically and not someone else?

Look for patterns: Are multiple people asking about the same type of problem? Are they asking about the same subject area? That pattern is pointing directly at an unfair advantage.

Real example: Lisa, a former project manager at a construction company, realized that people constantly asked her how to handle difficult subcontractors. Not just people at her company — friends at other companies, people she'd met at industry events, even her brother-in-law who was renovating his restaurant. "How do you deal with a subcontractor who keeps missing deadlines?" She'd been answering this question so often that she didn't even register it as special knowledge anymore. But it was. Most project managers either avoid confrontation or handle it badly. Lisa had developed a specific approach that worked, and people recognized it.

Question 2: What Have You Done That Most People in Your Industry Haven't?

This is about rare experiences — the things on your resume (or not on your resume) that set you apart from someone with a similar job title.

Think about:

• Cross-functional experience. Have you worked across multiple departments? Most people stay in their lane. If you've worked in both operations and sales, or both finance and HR, or both engineering and customer success, you understand connections between functions that most specialists don't see.

• Scale transitions. Have you worked at both a large corporation and a small startup? At a government agency and a private company? In a mature organization and a fast-growing one? Each of these transitions teaches you something that lifers at one type of organization never learn.

• Crisis experience. Have you been through a major crisis — a product recall, a layoff, a merger, a regulatory investigation, a market crash, a pandemic pivot? Crisis experience is extraordinarily valuable because it can't be simulated. You either have it or you don't.

• Building from scratch. Did you ever create a department, a process, a team, or a system from the ground up? Most people maintain and improve things that already exist. Builders think differently from maintainers, and that building experience is rare and valuable.

• Turnaround experience. Did you ever take something that was broken — a team, a process, a client relationship — and fix it? Turnaround skills are incredibly marketable because organizations always have broken things they need fixed.

Write down: The 3-5 most unusual or rare experiences from your career. The things that, if you were at a dinner party with 10 people in your industry, would make them say "Wait, you did that?"

Question 3: What Do You Know That Most People in Your Industry Don't?

Knowledge is different from experience. Experience is what you've done. Knowledge is what you've learned — sometimes through experience, sometimes through study, sometimes through being in the right place at the right time to learn something others missed.

Think about:

• Technical knowledge. Is there a specific system, regulation, methodology, or technology that you understand at an expert level? Maybe you're one of the few people who really understands how a particular piece of enterprise software works under the hood. Maybe you've mastered a specific regulatory framework that most people only know at a surface level.

• Market knowledge. Do you understand a specific customer segment, geographic market, or niche better than most? Maybe you spent years serving a specific type of client and understand their needs in granular detail.

• Institutional knowledge. Do you know things about how specific organizations work — their decision-making processes, their pain points, their budget cycles, their internal politics? This kind of knowledge is often overlooked but incredibly valuable when you're selling into those organizations.

• Trend knowledge. Have you spotted a trend or shift in your industry that others haven't recognized yet? Maybe you've seen the early signs of a regulatory change, a technology shift, or a market evolution. Being ahead of the curve is a powerful advantage.

Write down: The 3-5 things you know that would surprise or impress someone in your industry. The knowledge that makes you the "go-to" person in specific situations.

Question 4: What Relationships Do You Have That Most Others Don't?

Relationships are one of the most undervalued unfair advantages. In a world where cold outreach gets ignored and trust takes months to build, having existing relationships with the right people is incredibly powerful.

Think about:

• Decision-makers. Do you know the people who sign contracts and approve budgets at companies that could be your clients? A single warm introduction from a trusted contact can shortcut months of marketing and sales effort.

• Influencers. Do you know people who are respected voices in your industry? People whose recommendations carry weight? A single endorsement from the right person can launch your business.

• Fellow experts. Do you know other experts who might become referral partners? People with complementary skills who serve the same type of client? These relationships can create a steady stream of warm leads.

• Community members. Are you part of professional communities — industry associations, alumni networks, online groups — where potential clients or referral sources spend time? Your existing membership and reputation in these communities is an asset.

• Suppliers and vendors. Do you have relationships with companies that serve your target market? These relationships can become partnership opportunities.

Write down: The 10-15 most valuable professional relationships you have. Not your closest friends — your most strategically valuable connections. The people who, if they recommended you to someone, it would carry real weight.

Question 5: What Have You Learned from Failure That Most People Haven't?

This might be the most powerful question on this list. Some of the most valuable knowledge in the world comes from watching things go wrong, being part of things that went wrong, or cleaning up after things went wrong.

Think about:

• Projects that failed. What initiatives did you see collapse? What were the real reasons — not the official post-mortem reasons, but the actual, honest-to-goodness reasons things fell apart? Understanding why things fail is often more valuable than understanding why things succeed, because most people have success stories but few have analyzed their failures deeply.

• Decisions that backfired. What decisions did you see (or make) that turned out to be wrong? What did those failures teach you about decision-making in your industry? Someone who has seen a bad vendor selection, a premature product launch, or a poorly planned reorganization — and understands why it failed — can prevent others from making the same mistake.

• Assumptions that were wrong. What things did you believe early in your career that turned out to be completely false? What conventional wisdom in your industry have you seen disproven? Being able to challenge bad assumptions is a high-value skill.

• Near-misses. What situations almost went badly but were rescued at the last minute? What did those close calls teach you about risk management and early warning signs?

Write down: The 3-5 most significant failures, mistakes, or near-misses you've witnessed or been part of. For each one, write down the real lesson — not the sanitized version, but what actually went wrong and what you now know because of it.

Real example: David, a former software project manager, had been part of a $2 million ERP implementation that failed spectacularly. The project ran 18 months over schedule, the software didn't integrate with existing systems, and the company eventually abandoned it entirely. The official post-mortem blamed "scope creep." But David knew the real reasons: the implementation partner had never worked in their specific industry, key stakeholders weren't consulted until it was too late, and nobody had mapped the existing processes before trying to replace them. David now helps companies avoid exactly these mistakes. His pitch is essentially: "I've seen a $2 million IT project fail up close. Let me help you make sure yours doesn't." That's an unfair advantage.

Connecting Your Unfair Advantages to Your Business

Once you've answered all five questions, you'll have a rich inventory of specific, personal advantages. But advantages alone aren't a business. You need to connect them to real customer needs.

Here's how to do that:

Step 1: Cluster your advantages. Look at everything you've written down. What themes emerge? You might find that many of your advantages cluster around a specific area — say, regulatory compliance in a specific industry, or team management in high-growth environments, or technology implementation for non-technical organizations.

Step 2: Match clusters to customer problems. Take each cluster and ask: "What specific problem does this combination of advantages help me solve better than anyone else?" The answer to that question is the core of your business proposition.

Step 3: Test the match. For each cluster-problem match, ask: "Would a potential customer believe that these advantages make me uniquely qualified to solve this problem?" If yes, you've found your positioning foundation. If the connection feels weak, keep looking.

Step 4: Identify gaps. Are there any advantages you wish you had but don't? Maybe you have deep knowledge but a thin network. Maybe you have great relationships but limited technical knowledge in a specific area. Identifying gaps helps you prioritize what to build or who to partner with.

Your Unfair Advantage Stack

Think of your unfair advantages as a stack — layers that build on each other to create something greater than the sum of its parts.

At the foundation: your industry knowledge (the "what you know" layer)
On top of that: your specific experiences (the "what you've done" layer)
On top of that: your relationships (the "who you know" layer)
On top of that: your judgment and pattern recognition (the "what you can see that others can't" layer)

When a potential client evaluates you against alternatives, they're not comparing individual layers — they're comparing the entire stack. And your specific stack is unique. Nobody else in the world has exactly the same combination of knowledge, experience, relationships, and judgment that you have.

That's not motivational fluff. It's a structural reality. And it's the foundation of a business that can compete and win.

Key Takeaways:

• Unfair advantages are the specific, personal capabilities that can't be easily replicated or purchased
• They come from your unique combination of experiences, relationships, and knowledge
• The five discovery questions help you identify what's most specific, most rare, and most connected to customer needs
• Build your business around the intersection of your unfair advantages and real customer pain points