The Gore-Tex Simile

Unfortunately because of (or, maybe, luckily thanks to) my lack of education in Marketing or Business, I have made many obvious “errors” during my time at Vortex that any MBA student would have easily avoided. One of them: never speak using a negative. Surprisingly though, one of our main selling propositions: we are not consultants, has been a complete success.

There are many consultants in our sector. Some, very large, cover all aspects in Wind Resource Assessment. Others, very small, are experts in a pair of fields only. But at Vortex we like to think that we are not even part of the later group and that we wouldn’t want to compete with any of them. That’s probably why many consultants are some of our best customers.

Even though we are very open to giving our customers advice, we wouldn’t be good consultants. Instead, we feel quite comfortable with our specialized and automatized production of Virtual Wind data. Due to its very technical nature, these data often requires some degree of consultancy to be “digested” but, using the Gore-Tex©️ simile, Vortex aims just to produce the best possible “fabric” for consultants to then tailor the “clothes” for their end clients.

Serving many different consultants gives us a kind of “horizontal” perspective of the business which is very interesting for us and (we are convinced of it) also for them.

Another simile we like at Vortex is Google Maps©️. As many others, we rely on GM but, while depending on this service may have some risks, it wouldn’t be sensible to avoid them by developing our own mapping system, ours would be worse for sure.

We truly believe that in an increasingly “horizontal” world there is no big need to “verticalize” your providers. As long as there are strong common goals (in our case, the development of Wind Energy) and weak interests in competing, a healthy collaboration is better than the usual stressful mistrust between (or within) companies. Again, this is just the opinion of a non-educated, self-taught entrepreneur…

And by staying very focused on producing our specialized “fabric”, we can try to do it better everyday following the advice I heard many years ago in a Google©️ motivational speech: do only one thing but do it better than anybody else.

An afterthought: Nowadays, neither GoreTex©️ avoids tailoring clothes nor Google©️ is keeping the “do only one thing” rule but everybody knows that coherence is an overrated virtue…