How good businesses become commodities (and how they stop)

I spend a lot of my time on the buying side of the table. Chairing a Vistage group means sitting in rooms where CEOs compare accountants, lawyers, insurers, software vendors, and consultants (people like me get shortlisted and compared too, which keeps things honest). From that chair, I can tell you exactly how good businesses become commodities: they let the buyer run out of ways to tell them apart. That’s the whole mechanism. The work can stay excellent the entire time.

Last year I spent the better part of a week reading the websites of professional services firms in one small market. Around twenty of them, every one on a list, because a piece of research needed me to understand how they present themselves. By the fourth site I had started copying phrases into a document. “Professional.” “Experienced.” “Tailored solutions.” “A trusted advisor to our clients.” By the twentieth, the document read like one firm talking to itself in a mirror. I happen to know that some of these firms are genuinely excellent. A few have technical depth their competitors could never match, and cultures their people would defend with real feeling. None of that survived the trip to the homepage. If I had swapped the logos around, nobody would have caught it, including, I suspect, the partners themselves.

This matters because a commodity is a verdict, and buyers are the ones who deliver it. When three firms make identical claims with identical confidence, the only signal left with any information in it is price. So the buyer uses price. Inside the losing firms this gets read as a cheapening market, or as clients growing less loyal. From the buying side it looks much simpler: you were handed nothing else to weigh, so you weighed the one thing that differed.

AI is about to make the sameness far more expensive, because it is commoditising the execution layer of professional services. The filing, the report, the standard contract, the first draft of almost anything: a machine already produces a passable version, and within a few years it will produce a good one for close to nothing. I’ve watched this from both sides. Every firm whose core offering is execution will face questions about time and value, from every client, at every renewal. The only open question is how fast it arrives.

Meanwhile the thing buyers actually lack has become obvious. I am not short of information; no buyer is. I get reports I skim and dashboards I ignore. What I will pay a premium for, happily and without negotiating, is the person who has read everything I couldn’t face, then sits across from me and says:

Here’s what this means for your business. Here’s what I’d do.

That sentence is worth more than the hundred pages underneath it. Firms that sell clarity and judgment will keep their margins. Firms that sell process will compete on price until they can’t.

The standard response, once a firm notices its margins thinning, is to call an agency and ask for a rebrand. I run an agency, so believe me when I say a rebrand is a pleasant thing to sell, and I refuse the work countless times. Because on its own it fixes nothing, because the sameness was never a writing problem.

Those twenty websites sound alike because the firms behind them made the same decisions: serve every client who calls, keep every service line, hold every accreditation, and never say no to revenue. Identical strategies produce identical copy. Any honest copywriter handed the same inputs will keep arriving at “professional, experienced, tailored solutions,” because that is what a firm shaped like every other firm can truthfully say about itself.

The way out is positioning, and positioning worth the name is a business-model decision. It shows up in the client roster and the price list long before it shows up on a website: clients you name and deliberately stop chasing, services you hand to the machines without a fight because execution was never where your value sat.

The money and attention that frees up goes into the relationships where judgment gets sold. Usually it also means a partner giving up revenue they personally brought in, which is where most attempts quietly die. A positioning decision that costs you nothing is a slogan.

The odd comfort in all of this is that the more machines take over the work, the more the decision comes down to people. When the filing costs nothing, what I’m buying is the person on the other end of the phone: whether they know my business well enough to tell me something uncomfortable, and whether they’ll pick up when something breaks on a Friday afternoon.

The few firms I’ve studied that escaped commoditisation all did some version of the same thing. They picked one kind of buyer and worked out what kept that buyer up at night, then reorganised the whole firm around being the obvious answer, accepting everything the choice cost them.

If you run a firm and want to know where you stand, don’t ask your team; they’re too close to the mirror. Open your homepage next to your two nearest competitors’ and swap the logos. If everything still reads as true, your buyers have already run the same experiment, and you have your explanation for why every conversation ends up at price.