Ten years ago, I faced a business dilemma feared by all entrepreneurs. Until recently, my Internet connectivity company had been growing into one of the three major Internet service providers in Guatemala. We had a recognizable history of excellence, offered affordable services and provided dial-up to residential and corporate clients alike.
    
Suddenly, there was a huge shift in the telecommunications industry. The public telephone companies were being privatized and big telephone entities started to provide free Internet access. These big companies had an attractive business model. They offered pay-per-minute telephone calls as an added service in order to get users online for the longest time possible.
 
One day we were growing our business and signing up new users by the hour, and the next day our main product was given away by companies with massive advertising campaigns. Their pitch was, “Why pay for it when it’s free somewhere else?” It was a confusing and frightening time for me. These conglomerates were killing the company I founded. In an effort to keep our company alive, we took a step back and looked at the bigger picture.

Many of the decisions we made were reactive and were made under pressure. Though we still play an important role in Guatemala’s Internet industry, our company has been reinvented through several major decisions. We re-established ourselves by focusing on the following:

Specialization
Our first reaction to this problem was to add more products and services. We believed customers would want different types of connectivity, Web development, e-commerce, systems programming and other solutions. Later, we narrowed our product offering and decided to focus on satellite Internet connectivity. We left the other services behind, found a niche and became pretty good at that one thing.
 
Segmentation
While the major Internet companies fought over customers in Guatemala City and other Central American cities, we searched for customers in the most rural areas. We believed that the further they were, the better customers they would be. We do not differentiate pricing or installation times in terms of distance like our competitors do, a perk that has helped us get ahead of the pack.

Strategy
We knew everything we needed to know about satellite connectivity, but we still needed to define what our role was in the market. We needed to know how to succeed while competing against the bigger companies. Well, like the old saying goes,
“If you can’t beat them, join them.” We didn’t exactly join them— we decided to complete them. The larger companies’ growth strategy focused on high-density urban areas and spreads outward, while we searched for customers in low-density, distant rural zones. Instead of taking the big companies’ clients, we became the customers’ backup connection. Today, these powerhouse companies are more than 10% of our business.

It’s easier to look back and summarize our changes as if they were logical steps. In truth, there was a lot of trial and error. Anticipating big industry changes or technology leaps is one of the hardest challenges any entrepreneur can face. But thanks to the unexpected telecommunications shift, we managed to discover our purpose.

What’s more, we learned that to succeed in the long run, you don’t have to be excellent at everything. You just need to be really good at one thing.