I just got back from vacation a couple of weeks ago – we stayed in Grand Lake, Colorado, which is on the west side of Rocky Mountain National Park.  We had a great time, I got some fantastic pictures and I left thinking about Taxidermy (more on that in a minute).

It’s a beautiful area, the temperature was much lower than Kansas City and there is some great hiking in the National Park area.  I would highly recommend it for a summer family vacation area.

One of the cooler things we did was a tour of the Holzwarth Historic Site which is inside the park on the western side.

It’s a beautiful area, but what made it really interesting was the ranger / volunteer that shared the story about how the historic site was founded by John Halzworth back in the 1920s – originally as a dude ranch.

It turns out that John Halzworth was originally from Germany and came over to the U.S. in the late 1800s as an indentured servant and eventually ended up in Denver starting and successfully running a saloon.  He achieved the American Dream.

Right up until he got hit by the Prohibition and everything got shut down in 1916. (you could say that things ‘dried’ up) 

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Do you ever feel like your business or service is lined up with all of your competition and all of you look the same?  Wouldn’t it be great if you could stand out from the crowd? 

You could go with an original business idea to stand out, however I’m convinced that there are very few totally originally ideas out there at any given time.  (Go search Google the next time you think you’ve got something new…).

That’s not an indictment against imagination or creativity – actually it’s just the opposite, there are so many great tools, sources of information and creative people out there that it’s really difficult to imagine coming up with something that no one has ever thought of before.

So you’re probably not going to stand out because of a unique business idea, but you still need to separate yourself from the pack.

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