If you're a business owner like me, one of the things we all share is the desire to be the best in our line of work. Correction: the best of the best. You want to be a truly exceptional company in your industry, one that outperforms, outdelivers and outshines your competition, winning the race not just because you've trained and prepared for it, but because you genuinely stand out from the crowd.

In other words, you want to be the unicorn (in the figurative, not the financial, sense) among all the other horses, ponies and zebras running in your field.

That's a big ask. Becoming an exemplary example - the ideal prototype - of what a business like yours should be seems like a pretty tall order. But what if I told you that the question of how to achieve unicorn status actually has a short answer?

I've been working in the public relations space for close to two decades now, and in that time of representing countless clients and receiving feedback from them as to why they keep coming back to my PR firm, here's what I've come up with: To become a unicorn in your industry, do one thing really, really well.

My theory seems simplistic, I know. But the principle of parsimony (aka Occam's Razor) tells us that oftentimes, the simplest answer is the likeliest to be true, that the simplest route is the best way there. Picking one thing to excel at and then doing it spectacularly well might seem easy, but it requires a lot of effort.

First, you have to have the capacity, the skill, to excel in that area. Additionally, you have to learn how to leverage that standout aspect to make it work for you in the marketplace - incorporating it into your branding, spotlighting it in your messaging, maybe even including it in your name. Concise as the notion is, there's actually a lot of breadth and flexibility in it, for when it comes to selecting what you want to do better than anyone else is doing it, your choices are........

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