You’ve heard the advice. Find someone who’s successful and do what they do. Follow their launch plan. Use their posting schedule. Model their sales page.
It makes sense, right? Why reinvent something that already works?
But there’s a problem.
When you follow someone else’s formula too closely, your business starts looking and sounding like everyone else’s.
You are just another cookie-cutter.
And when people can’t see what makes you different, you’ve given them very little reason to choose you.
Why Copying Feels So Safe
There are good reasons you might be tempted to follow someone else’s formula.
It saves time. It feels proven. Someone else has already made a lot of the decisions for you.
There’s comfort in being able to say, “This is how I was told to do it.”
But there’s an important question that often gets missed:
Does it actually work for you?
The person who created that strategy built it around their business, strengths, personality, audience, and life.
You have a different combination of all of those things.
What works beautifully for them may be completely wrong for you.
The Hidden Cost of Blending In
Copying what works can seem like a shortcut. But there are costs that aren’t always obvious.
Your message starts to sound like too many others.
Your potential clients see a lot of content. If your content sounds like five other posts they’ve already scrolled past, so there isn’t much reason to remember it.
It becomes much harder to show why you’re different from your competition.
When your offers and messaging look almost identical to everyone else’s, people really can’t tell you apart.
Your business may not actually fit you.
You might be posting five days a week because someone told you to, offering discovery calls even though you hate doing them, or running complicated launches because someone else swears by them and none of it resonates with you.
I mean, none of those things is necessarily wrong, but at some point, you have to ask whether you’ve built a business for you or for the person whose instructions you followed.
BTW – This is exactly why The Unicorn Factor® was born!
Templates Are Not the Enemy
This doesn’t mean you need to throw away every template, framework, course, or piece of business advice you’ve ever received.
I use frameworks, I teach frameworks, and they can save time and give you a place to start.
The key is remembering that a template is a starting point, not the final product.
Take what works. Change what doesn’t. Question the pieces that don’t make sense for your business.
Before you publish, launch, sell, or commit to something, ask yourself:
Does this actually sound and feel like me?
If the answer is no, don’t assume you’re the problem.
Maybe you just need to make the template your own.
You Already Have What Makes You Original
You don’t need a gimmick to make your business different.
You already have years of experiences, lessons, mistakes, successes, opinions, and observations that have shaped how you think.
That shows up in:
- How you explain things
- The examples you use
- The opinions you’ve formed
- The problems you notice
- The way you solve those problems
- Your personality and sense of humor
Someone else can copy your offer.
They can copy your content topics.
They can even copy your business model.
But they can’t copy the combination of experience and perspective that you bring to it.
The trick is making sure you haven’t edited so much of yourself out of your business that nobody gets to see it.
AI Makes This Even More Important
AI has made it incredibly easy to create content that sounds like everyone else.
Tools like ChatGPT and Claude can help you brainstorm, organize your thoughts, create a first draft, and save a lot of time.
I use them too.
But if you give AI a generic prompt, take the first draft it gives you, and post it without adding yourself back in, you can quickly become what I call an AI copycat.
Instead, give AI something that comes from you.
Your thoughts. Your opinions. Your stories. Your examples.
Then question what it gives you. Change anything you wouldn’t actually say. Add the things only you would know to add.
AI can help you communicate your ideas, but it shouldn’t become the source of them.
Make It Yours
Being original doesn’t mean you have to invent everything from scratch.
You can learn from other people, use the templates and try the frameworks.
Just make sure you make your own decisions about what stays and what goes.
You’ve spent years developing the experience and perspective you bring to your business.
Use it.
Because the goal isn’t to become really good at doing what works for everyone else.
It’s to figure out what works for you.
So here’s something to think about this week:
What’s one thing in your business you’re doing simply because that’s how everyone else does it?
If you want to talk it through with other business owners who are working on standing out instead of blending in, come join us in the Stand Out & Succeed Facebook group.
