There’s a peculiar thing about the word disruption.
Somewhere along the way, it became the exclusive property of people wearing expensive trainers, pitching software nobody quite understands and explaining how their latest funding round values a company with twelve customers at $400 million.
Meanwhile, a bloke with three vans, a decent booking system and a habit of answering his phone is quietly taking half the local removal market.
Nobody invites him to speak at a technology conference.
Which is a shame, because he might actually have something useful to say.
We’ve confused disruption with technology
The startup world loves a particular kind of story.
Young founder spots problem. Young founder builds app. Investors throw money at app. Founder appears on magazine cover looking thoughtfully into the middle distance.
Sometimes it works spectacularly. Sometimes the app disappears and everyone involved moves on to the next revolutionary idea.
But there’s another sort of disruption happening, mostly unnoticed.
It’s happening in industries that haven’t changed much in decades. Industries where customers have simply accepted that things are complicated, expensive, slow or irritating.
Not because they like it.
Because nobody has offered them anything better.
A company doesn’t need artificial intelligence to change that. It might just need to turn up when it says it will.
I know. Radical stuff.
The businesses nobody bothers to photograph
Take waste collection.
For years, getting rid of unwanted furniture was an unnecessarily miserable experience. You hired a skip, persuaded someone to help lift a sofa or spent a Saturday negotiating with the local recycling centre.
Then companies started treating rubbish removal like an actual customer service business.
Clear pricing. Bookable appointments. Uniformed staff. Someone else does the lifting.
The underlying activity hadn’t changed. The business model had.
It’s the sort of opportunity explored in Industries Still Waiting for Their 1-800-GOT-JUNK Moment.
And once you start looking, you see similar opportunities everywhere.
Tradespeople who provide proper estimates rather than vague promises.
Small manufacturers who sell directly to customers instead of navigating layers of distributors.
Independent food producers who discover that people will pay more for something they can trace back to an actual farm.
None of these businesses needs to invent a new industry.
They just need to notice what everyone else has stopped questioning.
The energy business is getting interesting
Electricity is a particularly good example.
For most of modern history, the arrangement has been fairly straightforward. Large companies generate electricity, networks distribute it and customers receive a bill.
The customer has very little involvement beyond paying.
Solar panels complicate that arrangement.
Suddenly a homeowner can generate some of their own electricity. Add battery storage and they may be able to use more of that generation after sunset.
They’re still connected to the wider energy system, of course. But the relationship has changed.
The customer is no longer exclusively a passive buyer.
And the interesting businesses here aren’t necessarily the enormous energy corporations investing billions in infrastructure.
They’re also the regional companies making the technology accessible to ordinary property owners.
Look at the Balearic Islands. Sunshine is hardly in short supply, yet fitting solar panels to a property still involves decisions about roof space, electricity consumption, installation and whether battery storage makes financial sense.
Businesses such as Balearic Solar operate in that practical space between renewable-energy technology and homeowners who want it working on their roofs.
It’s not particularly glamorous. Nobody is promising to reinvent civilisation by Tuesday.
But helping households produce electricity changes something fundamental about an industry that once gave consumers very few choices.
That’s disruption too.
The advantage of being small enough to care
There’s another uncomfortable truth here.
Large companies often become extremely good at serving themselves.
They develop processes, departments, approval systems and elaborate explanations for why something that ought to take twenty minutes requires six working days.
Eventually, the process becomes more important than the customer.
A smaller business can sometimes walk straight through that gap.
Not because small businesses are automatically wonderful. Plenty are dreadful.
But because a good owner-operated business can change something on Monday morning without needing permission from a committee in another country.
Customers notice.
They notice when someone remembers their name. They notice when the person quoting for the work actually understands the work. They notice when a problem gets solved rather than transferred.
None of that is revolutionary technology.
It’s competence.
And competence, in the wrong industry, can look suspiciously like a competitive advantage.
Investors aren’t always looking for the same thing as customers
Venture capital has its place. Some businesses genuinely need enormous amounts of money before they can produce anything useful.
You can’t build a semiconductor factory with a credit card and a motivational podcast.
But the financial incentives of a venture-backed startup aren’t necessarily the same as those of a profitable independent business.
Investors want substantial returns. Often that means rapid growth, market dominance and an eventual exit.
A business owner might want something entirely different.
A healthy margin. Reliable customers. Good employees who stay. A company that remains profitable without doubling in size every eighteen months.
Strangely enough, that can be a perfectly sensible ambition.
We’ve touched on this before in The Anti-Startup Startup: Entrepreneurs Who Rejected Traditional Funding.
Refusing to chase outside investment isn’t evidence of a lack of ambition.
Sometimes it means understanding exactly what sort of business you want to own.
The boring businesses might have the last laugh
There’s a reason plumbing, roofing, electrical work, logistics and industrial maintenance rarely dominate entrepreneurial media.
They’re difficult to romanticise.
You can’t easily turn a blocked drain into an inspirational keynote about changing humanity.
But these industries have something that a remarkable number of fashionable startups lack.
Customers who already need the service.
The demand exists. The problem is real. Someone is already paying to solve it.
The opportunity is to solve it better.
That might mean using software to remove administrative friction. It might mean transparent pricing. It might mean developing specialist expertise in a neglected corner of the market.
Or it might mean doing what you promised, charging a fair price and not disappearing when the customer has a question.
The businesses doing this well aren’t always the ones making the most noise.
As we argued in The Most Profitable Businesses You’ll Never See on a Podcast, commercial success and public attention are two very different things.
You can have an impressive business without having an impressive personal brand.
Imagine that.
Perhaps we’re looking for rebels in the wrong places
I like a genuinely ambitious startup. I like people attempting things that sound ridiculous until somebody makes them work.
But I think we’ve become rather too impressed by the performance of entrepreneurship.
The pitch decks. The funding announcements. The endless talk of ecosystems, scaling and changing the world.
Meanwhile, the person who has figured out how to make a neglected industry work properly is getting on with it.
No manifesto.
No launch party.
Probably no podcast.
Just customers who keep coming back and competitors wondering where their business has gone.
Maybe the most rebellious thing an entrepreneur can do isn’t to invent something nobody has ever seen.
Maybe it’s to look at something everyone has accepted for years and ask a very simple question.
Why on earth are we still doing it like that?