USP: it's what makes a company succeed.

How does a company grow from being a small, family-owned operation to having 20,000 employees and sales of $2.8 billion?

It's all because of the acronym, USP. It stands for "Unique Selling Proposition" and all successful organizations take the time to carefully craft and fine tune their USP so that tangible and intangible qualities of the product make it clearly stand out from the competition.

Too many companies try to be like each other, and offer nothing unique to set them apart. In the clutter of the marketplace, the most well known and the least expensive tend to win out.

Many products and services are commodities today. In a mature marketplace, the companies that succeed focus on their USP. It starts by doing research. It starts by listening to clients to see what they want.

In the late 1960s Frank Perdue was struggling to grow his business and his profit margins. He raised chickens. Once he made the decision to cut out the distributor (middleman), and sell chickens directly to grocery stores and butcher shops, he set out on the road.

Frank spent six months traveling. Unlike most of his competitors, he didn't hit the road selling. While Frank knew in his heart that his chickens were better than those raised by his competitors, he needed verification and validation. He went out and listened to his clients, past, present and future. He asked them what qualities were important in the chickens they sold.

The responses varied widely. He heard they wanted yellow chickens, so Frank fed the chickens a grain that gave the meat a golden hue. Butchers didn't like the little golden hairs left on the wings after the plucking was finished, so Frank's engineers developed a torch that would singe the hairs off. His clients wanted more white meat, so Frank cross-bred chickens to give them the desired results.

Each item on the list represented an opportunity and a challenge. The opportunity meant more sales. It also meant better relationships. The challenge was that each item would take valuable resources, including time, money and would mean forgoing other opportunities. The end result was that Frank could not only sell more chickens, he could sell those chickens at a higher price. He just didn't believe that his chickens were better; he bad done research and acted upon what he heard.

Kenneth W. Keller is President of Renaissance Executive Forums North Los Angeles County. He gathers top executives and business owners together to help them "work on their businesses, instead of working in them." [e-mail] or [phone]