How to Hire a Beach House
Jobs to Be Done Theory, a legacy of Clayton Christensen, is one of the easiest theories to explain but hardest to implement.
If you aren’t familiar, I always use the example of the time my buddy and I were surfing in Australia to get the point across. We walked into a surf shop our first day to rent boards and the owner asked us which we’d like to “hire.” I thought this was a funny way of phrasing it, and responded that “I’d like to hire a surfboard.” He smiled and elaborated - “well, what are you hiring it to do? Are you hiring it to learn how to surf? To surf shoulder-high waves? Take a few Instagram pictures and sit on the beach with a beer?”
The surfboard was a tool you hired to get a specific job done, and he needed to know which job I had.
The essence of JTBD is that until you know the exact job your customer is hiring you for, you can’t build the right product. And that’s the difficult insight - job selection/identification comes before product build.
This past week I was on vacation with the family at the beach. It was exactly what a week with a 2.5 year old and a 6 month old should be - 70% moments I’ll think back on over the next 50 years and smile, and 30% moments where I’d have happily sold you both my kids for a ham sandwich.
A few days into the vacation the service we rented the house from emailed asking if we were interested in seeing any properties to buy during our trip.
This is day one sales stuff - there’s no better moment to get someone to buy a beach house than when they’re enjoying a week in a beach house. Also, the email came on a perfectly sunny day - not a coincidence.
But the interesting part was how the email was positioned. In the subject, they mentioned that their homes were perfect for a “1031 Exchange.” Basically, if you sell a property and invest in a second within 45 days, provided that second property is used for business or investment property and not personal use, you defer capital gains tax.
The email then went into three scenarios, or jobs:
Selling your primary home after your kids are out of the house to downsize and live at the beach
Selling your vacation home somewhere else to buy a new home here
Selling an investment property somewhere else to buy a home at the beach
It then talked about how they’d already built the “product” to make each of those a 1031 Exchange, even if you were planning on living at the beach house the majority of your time.
This email was, clearly, speaking to customer that already understood a 1031 Exchange. It was showing how they’d figured out a way to use that tool to make it easier for you to buy a beach house in three specific scenarios.
It was also helping customers realize that a problem they might have in another part of their life - maybe they owned a home that’d appreciated a bunch and they wanted to sell it but didn’t want to take the tax hit - could be solved in a different way.
It’s clear they saw that customers were using properties for this purpose and leaned into it. It might go over the head of a few vacationers just looking to buy a beach house, but they picked a customer and a job and leaned into it. That’s hard but usually worth it.
So… obvious ending… what job is your customer hiring you to do? And how can you lean further into it?