The difference between a struggling business and a thriving one often isn't about working harder. It's about repositioning what you're actually selling to someone who desperately needs it.
This lesson is hidden in an unlikely place: a scene from Better Call Saul that reveals the blueprint for real positioning, not the buzzword version. When Jimmy McGill (Saul's legal name) gets stuck working a cell phone job at a company called CC Mobile, the store sits empty. He's vacuuming. No customers. He calls his boss asking about busier locations, but gets told to wait. Instead of waiting, he does something remarkable—he creates an entirely new type of customer.
The Move That Changes Everything
According to business guru Peter Drucker, "The purpose of a business is to make profit and also to create a customer." That sounds paradoxical. How do you create a customer?
The answer is simpler than it sounds: take your product and, without changing it, move it to someone else entirely. Find a whole different category of people for whom this product solves a completely different problem.
Instead of selling cell phones as a technology product—talking about data plans, roaming charges, hands-free access—Jimmy sold privacy. He painted a sign across the window: "Privacy sold here." That single reframing changed everything. Suddenly, people who had no interest in mobile technology became intensely interested, because he'd identified a real problem they already felt.
Agitation Precedes the Sale
When a gentleman pulls up in a truck and reads the sign, Jimmy is already on a fake phone call with a pretend customer, saying he can't sell phones because demand is so high. He even destroys a brand new phone mid-conversation to demonstrate what the product actually does—untraceable, single-use communication. The curiosity is already activated before the man even walks through the door.
This is where most salespeople get it wrong. They lead with features. Jimmy led with agitation of a problem the customer already knew they had.
When the man enters, Jimmy doesn't rush to serve him. Instead, he has a stack of phones marked "do not sell," creating artificial scarcity. Jimmy leans into the vagueness too—when asked what needs privacy from, he offers options without being too specific. "Like the IRS?" the customer suggests. "Bingo," Jimmy confirms. The customer fills in the blank himself, making the problem feel more real.
Then comes the genius part: Jimmy coins a term. He calls it "information hygiene"—the practice of keeping your conversations so clean that government or tax agencies have nothing to listen to. By naming the problem and the solution, he's repackaged the entire value proposition.
The Positioning Formula
In marketing, positioning is defined as the space you occupy in the heart and mind of the customer relative to your competitors. But there's a step that comes first: you have to find customers who already have the problem your product solves.
Jimmy needed to identify a customer with a pain point where untraceable cell phones were the perfect fit. Once he found them, the sale essentially sold itself. As he told one customer: "Private conversations are few and far between" in correctional facilities. He was speaking directly to a pain they felt every day, using language they understood, not language designed to impress them.
Appearance Sells Too
When Jimmy first approaches a group of kids, they reject him immediately. He's dressed like a lawyer—his old self. They assume he's an undercover cop. Jimmy realizes that if he doesn't look like his customers, his customers won't trust him.
He goes home and changes into a tracksuit, adopting the aesthetic of the people he's selling to. Now he looks like them. When he returns, the phones start flying out of the trunk. He can't keep inventory.
This reveals an uncomfortable truth: a huge part of positioning is perception and packaging. If the messenger doesn't fit the message, the sale dies before it starts.
Go to Where Customers Actually Are
The store had been dead because foot traffic was low. No one was going to a cell phone store looking for "privacy." So Jimmy did what most struggling businesses never do—he brought the product to where the customers were. He loaded phones into his trunk and drove to where people who needed untraceable communication actually gathered.
This is a direct lesson for anyone building a business today. If your ideal customers are on TikTok, create content on TikTok. If they're on LinkedIn, be there. If they're hanging out in specific communities or gathering places, that's where you need to show up. Reduce the friction. Make it easy for them to find you by going to them first.
The Blue Ocean Strategy
All of Jimmy's success happened because he left the red ocean. In the early cell phone market, competition was intense—everyone was fighting for the same customers with the same pitch. Jimmy moved to a completely different ocean where demand already existed but wasn't being served.
This is blue ocean strategy. Instead of fighting for scraps in a saturated market where everyone uses the same positioning, you identify an unmet need and own that entire space.
The parallel in the speaker's own business is telling. He used to make commercials, but as fewer people watched commercials, the demand for that service declined. Rather than wait around watching the industry eat itself, he pivoted. He took the same skillset—brand strategy and design—and applied it to a different customer base with different needs. Same capabilities, different ocean.
The Real Lesson
When you're stuck chasing leads that don't convert and struggling to stand out in a saturated market, the solution isn't to work harder or optimize what you're already doing. It's to step back and ask: Am I selling this to the right person? Is there someone else for whom this solves a completely different problem?
Stop describing your offer in terms of features. Stop trying to be better than your competitors at what everyone else is already doing. Instead, find a customer who has a pain point your product solves, agitate that pain using their language, and watch the sale happen on its own.
The burner phone market didn't exist because it was a good cell phone product. It existed because someone repositioned that product for people with a very specific need. That's not luck. That's positioning.