How to Gain a Competitive Edge & Avoid Falling

As I was at the gym yesterday I was in the middle of a stretch that would have made my brother proud. With one leg extended out in a lunging position and pulling up the opposite for a quad stretch, I was in position that required high concentration and a lot of balance. Only two points of my body were touching the floor and if my eyes were not focused on my toe/knee in front of me, I would surely fall.

But sure enough, some guy was doing some sort of overly elaborate jump rope routine and I just had to look. TIMMMBBBEERRRR! His desired effect accomplished (aka look at me), I had to snap out of my stretch and throw my hand down to avoid landing on my face. I lost focus on myself and paid the price with a tumble off the mini-yoga mat on which I was positioned.

Too often we do the same thing in our businesses. We are so focused on what our competition is doing, that we skimp on putting work into our own product. We obsess at how great their website looks, we talk about their marketing campaign, we speculate on how much they paid for their building, and then we wonder why they are mopping the floor with us.

Don’t get it twisted, there is a time and place for observing our competition. If we are oblivious to what they are doing, we can be outflanked or undercut in a heartbeat. But when we let it take up more than a small fraction of our time, we lose focus on what is important: ourselves.

It is important for us to know our competition, but not be captivated by them. We need to know when they are running specials and what their core competencies are, but we don’t need to check up on them every morning, noon, and night. Find out what they’re good at, if we can beat them there, beat them there. If we can’t beat them there, find out where we can beat them and focus on that. 

• What if we spent that same time on our own business?
• What if, instead of envying their website, we look for a web developer to help us improve ours?
• What if, instead of talking about their marketing campaign, we implement a new social media campaign of our own?
• What if, instead of speculating how much they paid for a building, we focused on maximizing our floor space to show more products?
• How different would things be for us if we stopped worrying about the competition and focused on our business?

In my previous life I worked with a store that was more than preoccupied with their competition. They would do all of the above and then some. But they had a solid business and a good base of customers. They had disadvantages in some areas which were hard to overcome, but in other areas they were head and shoulders above the competition.

The store owner would tell me how awful it was and how much time they spent trying to ‘mess with competition’ instead of working with their own unhappy employees. They would brag to me how about how they would flag all the competitions’ ads on Craigslist when their own marketing campaign wasn’t bringing in it’s potential amount of customers. They were focused on the wrong things and they have remained a ‘middle-of-the-pack’ furniture store since not heeding my advice to stop wasting time on those sorts of activities. 

On the other hand, another store has done completely the opposite. They embraced the competition, studied them, and saw where their store had advantages. They focused on those core competencies and didn’t stress over every little move the competition made. THAT ended up being a $2,000,000 store this past year.

—

What competitive advantages does your business have over others? Leave a comment below or chat with me on social media about your core competencies, I’d love to hear from you.

If you enjoy what you’ve read, sign up for my email updates. You only get emails when I make a new post, it would be an honor to have you join the community!

Have a great day!