…or ground-breaking. Or to develop a wonder-drug. Or an app that no one’s ever dreamed of before. You just need to be ten per cent better than your competitors.

And now let’s travel back to 1985 in Seattle. A husband has just told his pregnant wife he wants to start a business based on a trip to Italy.

Wife: “You’re going to risk everything – including the future of our child – because you want to open a coffee shop. Like the world needs another coffee shop. For God’s sake, Howard, you have a good job with Starbucks…”

The husband was Howard Schultz – about to sink $400,000 of borrowed money into Il Giornale, a coffee shop where they sold excellent espressos. Two years later the original Starbucks management sold its Starbucks retail units to Schultz and Il Giornale for $3.8m. The rest, as they say…

In many ways, Mrs Schultz was right. The world didn’t need another coffee shop. But Howard Schultz knew he could do it better. And that’s true of 99 per cent of the business successes I’ve seen. For every one ‘why has nobody thought of that before’ idea, there are 99 businesses that have succeeded by simply doing it better.

Unless you’re a creative genius, the very-high-chances are that the business idea you’ve just had has already been thought of, but all you’ve done is proved that there’s a demand for your idea. You simply need to consistently deliver a better product or service.

Let me finish by returning to that conversation between Mr and Mrs Schultz. The numbers and the business may be different, but I’ll wager heavily that a lot of people reading this had exactly that conversation.

And no – the world didn’t need your business. But like Howard Schultz, you had the drive and the vision to believe that you could be ten per cent better: the ten per cent that makes all the difference.

Like Starbucks, I absolutely believe TAB does it that crucial ten per cent better. It’s what makes our business model so successful – and if you’re not a member of TAB York, it’s what could add the vital ten per cent that would make all the difference to your business.