Let me guess how your business works.
You deliver a skip.
The customer fills it.
You pick it up.
If you’re a smaller skip firm, you probably tip it at someone else’s transfer station.
If you’re a bigger one, you sort it yourself.
Job done.
Because that’s what everyone does, right?
Exactly.
And that’s the problem.
“We’re basically all the same” — that’s the real crisis
I hear it all the time:
“Gerald, waste firms? We’re all pretty much the same, aren’t we?”
And honestly? If you believe that… you’ve stopped thinking like a business owner. You’re thinking like a photocopier.
Would a restaurant owner say:
“Food’s food, isn’t it? People come in hungry, we feed ’em. Why be different?”
Of course not. Because people want atmosphere, creativity, service — a reason to come back.
Same goes for waste.
If your biggest differentiator is the colour of your skips — purple, orange, sky-blue-pink — then I hate to break it to you: you’ve missed the point of what it means to be in business.
Blending in is a fast track to the bottom
When your business looks, sounds and behaves like every other skip firm:
- Staff treat it like “just a job”
- Your marketing blends into the beige fog
- Customers buy on price alone
And price-led competition is the terminal illness of any industry.
It gets worse: some firms try to paper over the cracks with buzzwords.
“We care about the environment” lifted straight off someone else’s homepage.
No detail, no evidence, no originality.
It doesn’t work — and customers can smell the copy-paste.
So what’s the alternative?
Real businesses stand out.
Not with shiny logos or a gimmicky slogan.
But by creating genuine, valuable differentiation in:
- The services you offer
- The customer experience you provide
- The value you add beyond just shifting waste
But here’s the catch: it takes effort. And a bit of guts.
Because it’s easier to be a photocopier.
It’s easier to shrug and say, “Well, that’s just how the industry works.”
The good news? Most of your competitors are asleep at the wheel
That’s not an insult. It’s an opportunity.
If you want to steal a march, now’s the time.
It’s not even that hard to stand out — because no one else is bothering to try.
Start by asking:
- What’s the biggest frustration your customers have when ordering a skip?
- What’s the one thing you could do to make their life easier?
- How could you create an experience that makes them not want to risk going elsewhere?
Then build from there.
Or just carry on being forgettable…
You can keep running an identikit skip firm. You can keep hoping nobody notices that there’s nothing special about what you do.
Just don’t be surprised when your margins vanish faster than a packet of HobNobs left in the drivers’ break room.
This blog post is also available as a video on YouTube
