If you’ve been considering your competitors as roadblocks, or hindrances, you 've been overlooking an important springboard to success.

Business owners frequently consider their competition as the enemy. Many focus on "beating the other guy" because that’s how they measure their success—just like in sports, where one side has to beat the other to win. However, by focusing on beating the competition, you will divert yourself from your real objectives: increasing profits, gaining more time and gaining more control. Bottom line, you will succeed at these goals only by improving yourself and your business, regardless of the competition.

You can use your competition to further your own prosperity.

Let’s look at how this can be done.

Phase 1: Face Your Competition

The first step in prospering because of competition is to identify and analyze the “Real Competition.” It’s frequently not readily apparent. Sure, your business might have new and unique products or services, but when the needs they actually fulfill are defined, you’ll discover that many other types of products and/or services fulfill similar (if not the same) ones.

The second step is to evaluate your competition thoroughly—to know more about them than they or your potential customers do. You gain considerable knowledge and power by doing this, which you will be able to use during the next step.

Phase 2: Embrace Your Competition

The next step is to embrace your competition. That’s right! In fact, you want and need competition. Here are several of the reasons why:

• Your potential customers need to compare. They need to compare your business and your products and/or services to someone or something in order to see and feel that your products and/or services provide the best deal for them. Everything is relative, and comparison in buying is a very natural thing.

• You need your competition as a place to send unwanted customers. That is . . .

1. You need to avoid and/or get relief from bad customer experiences. You quite often spend too much time, money and effort on extremely demanding, very price conscious, "unappeasable" customers, who almost always produce no profits and sometimes create losses. Even worse, they distract you from your best customers, who drift away in silence.

2. You might as well let your competitors enjoy these problem people. Let your competitors deal with these unwanted troubling customers so they will overlook the better ones—who might seek you out.

3. You show strength to customers when you don’t fear competition. Many potential customers will try to threaten you and your business with "The Competition" as a negotiating tactic. Your confident understanding of your competitors and of your desirable customers will allow you to educate them to the real differences. This is how you can position your business favorably.

• You need to be pushed to continually improve.

Monopolies create terrible consequences. Competition creates a desire to keep getting better. By not improving, a business is not standing still—in reality it’s declining toward its demise.

• Your competitors will frequently teach you new ways to succeed.

You will want to execute very profitable programs that follow similar, if not identical, programs previously instituted successfully by competitors. Does the term "re-engineering" sound familiar? Japanese automakers dissected American and European cars then took the best features and combined them into very desirable products that filled many needs the other automakers failed to provide.

• Your competitors will frequently supply you business opportunities.

They may choose to ignore your potential customers or interact offensively with them, or they may be incapable of providing the benefits that your customers want.

• Competitors will frequently open up markets that did not exist before.

When they open up new markets to sell the same type of products you do, you and your business can follow right on in and prosper. Sound silly? Look how fast food restaurants feed off of each other by congregating in certain areas, making it very easy for customers to pick from a number of choices.

Phase 3: Position your business to provide a desirable comparison.

Establish your business so that it will be much more desirable to your target customers, when they compare you to your competitors. Use the knowledge gained in the above steps to create a comparative edge in as many ways as possible. Encourage your customers to compare, especially in the areas where you have the favorable edge. This allows them to make a confident decision to buy from your business because you appear to be better for them than your competitors.

Examples of how businesses thrive because of their competition.

There are examples all around you of business owners thriving because of their competition. One couple, for example, started a cleaning business in the face of an overabundance of competitors and greatly prospered, even with higher prices. They succeeded because they were the only business to quickly answer the phone with a live friendly person to immediately tend to customer requests. Their competition actually drove excellent customers to them.

In another case, a development group created an extremely profitable new ski resort by concentrating on providing warm, courteous and ever-increasing benefits to their skiers. The existing ski areas considered themselves the "only game in town" and were more focused on treating their directors as semi-royalty, while they virtually ignored their paying customers. The developers of the new resort feasted on the monopoly the others thought they had.

Look at the fast food restaurants (McDonald's, Burger King, Wendy's , etc.) They tend to locate their stores near one another to feed off of each other, by capturing the hungry people who are attracted to the area.

Conclusion!

By using your competition and what you learn from them, you can prosper because you focus on improving your business and not on beating your competition. Succeeding at business is not a Zero Sum Game. Your competitors do not have to lose for you to win. You will win more often than not by using your competition to your unique advantage.

Provided as an educational service by Bill Dueease of The Coach Connection.

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