Or listen direct on Spotify

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Don’t be so obsessed with your competition

Business people get so obsessed with what “the competition” are up to.

And staying alert is good. You need to know what you’re up against.

It brings risks, though. It restricts your mental horizons. In the long-run, it will make you exactly the same as your competitors. And it stops you understanding how your clients are really thinking.

The natural fallback chat topic around your business is what competitors are up to. How they’re pricing. What new products and services you think they’re about to release. Gossip about who they’re hiring and what clients they’ve won and lost. You all read the same trade news.

So if a close competitor does something, your business is likely to do it, just to be safe. The herd instinct is strong.

You’ll get further if you look wider

Your whole business becomes the average of what everyone else is doing. Deep down you feel it’s OK, because what sets your business apart is “our quality and our service”.

Plus you have a slogan you think solves the differentiation problem, like “Experience The Difference”.

It does not solve the problem. To potential customers, you and your competitors all look and feel exactly the same. You’re all obsessed with your product and talk about it too much.

So unless you have a personal relationship with the buyer, you will forever be on the same playing field of reverse-auction lowball pricing.

You’ll get further if you look wider.

In last week’s throwback yarn on the Michelin Guide, we looked at how their main competition was not other tyre makers. It was people choosing to not use their cars much. So the Michelin Brothers came up with the idea to get them driving around the countryside using up tyre life.

What if snacks are your real enemy?

In my industry, events, suppliers are united by their love of the subject and an unshakeable belief that events are great. What’s not to like? Yummy food and drinks! Entertainment! Enthralling presentations! Storms of applause! People will tell you “The audience said it was the best event they’d ever attended”, and that’s all the proof you need.

But why do those events exist? And who is paying for them?

Let’s look at the commercial reason for events. Many of them are to make a workforce feel good about each other and about their organisation. So they keep working there.

The biggest single cost for most businesses is staff. And the cost of staff churn is horrendous. Recruiting, retraining, loss of corporate memory and so on.

If you’re an events person, your client is probably someone with an interest in the nuts and bolts of events. But the money comes from someone further up the food chain whose interest is purely minimising staff churn.

If an event delivers that ROI, great. But if that CFO thought they could achieve higher staff retention per dollar with an office refit and higher-quality snacks in the kitchen, you better believe they’ll do it in a heartbeat.

Build a long, profitable, competitor-proof relationship

It can bruise your professional ego. But when you realise your competition is snacks, rather than all the usual suspects you quote against, it reveals a whole new landscape.

Armed with this new knowledge that the goal is staff retention (or whatever it is) rather than audience applause, you can speak that language in meetings. Ask how they measure the results. Tweak your services to help them deliver those results.

You become the supplier that feels like a strategic partner rather than just someone who wants their money.

Over time, you build relationships higher up in the client organisation, which is a great way to build a long, profitable, competitor-proof relationship.

Because now there isn’t an army of others they believe would be a safe replacement for you.

An unseen universe of competitors

In most fields, there’s an unseen universe of different competitors.

A lot of lawyers read this blog. Lawyers can be pretty competitive.

When we were setting up Scene Change I felt we should have a law firm. I didn’t know anyone, so I asked an old client, a sensible entrepreneur/investor with a global track record.

He laughed and said,

“It’s not the 80s any more, you don’t need one. I don’t have lawyers, accountants do all the business stuff now. They just bring in lawyers for specific tasks.”

Ad agencies have had their lunch cut by consulting firms with PowerPoint shows promising to bring revenue certainty to CFOs who want to hear that message.

If you sell low-priced hatchbacks, your competitor is social apps that give teenagers enough social contact to not want a drivers license right now.

Your competitors, now and in the future, aren’t just the ones you’re looking at.

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Hilarious Yet Also Incredibly Insightful

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