Competition in Business - How Should You Deal With It?
Do you know your competitors as your biggest enemies? Do you hate them and do not like to communicate or cooperate with them?You think that you would make much more money if they didn’t exist?
Yes, you would make a lot or money if you didn’t have any competitor in your business but in spite of having a lot of competitors, you still have to keep on working and make money.
So you can not stop working because of the competition.
Competition is one of the most important part of living and working in this world. It exists and you have to deal with it, whether you like it or not. Some people like to compete because they believe competition helps them improve and progress. Whereas many others don’t like to compete because they can not tolerate the competitors.
The second group will have a lot of problems in their life and business. Why? Because as I said, whether you like it or not, competition exists and you have to deal with it.
Competition has been living with human from the first day. We had to compete with the other animals to survive. We could do that because we were wiser than them. Yes, our wisdom helped us to complete and survive. We should use the same wisdom to compete with our business competitors. But does it mean that we have to use our wisdom to fight with the competitors and eliminate them? Absolutely not.
We Keep Up Our Good Work
We learn from our mistakes and become better and better everyday. Our competitors have to do this too but most of them can not do that because they are not as smart and wise as us. We do not try to do something to kick our competitors out of the game. We just keep up our good work and let the others know that we are doing relatively good and our service/product works for them.
We don’t say on our websites that we are better than our competitors. We make our websites as best as possible and it is the users that should judge and decide who is better. We check our competitors’ websites all the time and try to learn from their ideas but we do not copy their ideas. We learn and process them and make better ideas. Our competitors will do the same if they can and then we have to repeat this over and over. This is how we compete and this is how the life, business, internet and … improves.
Unfortunately I see many well-known companies that try to kick out their competitors out of the game through some dirty actions. For example, it is a long time that I receive flyers, phone calls and … from an internet and phone company. They ask me to cancel my membership with the current company and apply for their service. I have refused to do that so far because I don’t like the way that they are competing.
In USA, the same company calls the customers of its competitors, ask them to apply for its service and when the customers say that they have no time to cancel their current service they receive from the competitor company, they say they will do it on behalf of you. You just say yes to us and we will do everything. By following this dirty game, they have been able to take their competitor down to the bankruptcy level. Hundreds of employees have lost their jobs.
We Communicate and Cooperate with Our Competitors
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Only those who follow this rule have become successful. The others who didn’t like to do that became abandoned and then gave up. I have seen this many times. We had a competitor who loved to walk on the others and take the business from everybody. He was not wise enough to understand that he can not compete with his competitors by cheating. He could do that temporarily but he was kicked out of the game when he was found out.
He was used to have home page link exchanging with the other websites but instead of placing the others links on his website home page, he was used to load the links from another place using some JavaScript codes. The links were on his website home page apparently but in fact they were not there. What happened then? He could take his website up to the Google first page but when the webmasters found out that they have been cheated by him, all of them filed a spam report to Google and his website went down for good.
Now he is a hateful guy among the “work at home” webmasters. He has been taking the advantage of our websites without giving any advantage.
This is a lesson for everybody who wants to become successful. Only fools try to cheat and have a dirty competition.
Competition may seem an inevitable element of doing business — to some extent, that’s inescapable. But don’t overlook the value of cooperation, even with other businesses that, on the surface, may seem to you like fight-to-the-death competitors. You may be pleasantly surprised how happily — and profitably — you can coexist.
Are You Really Competing?
The first step in considering the possibility of cooperating with other businesses is to examine in detail the operations with which you’re purportedly competing. If you take your study deep enough, you may uncover more differences than similarities.
“Entrepreneurs tend to see their competitors in very black and white terms,” notes David Gumpert, author of “Burn Your Business Plan!: What Investors Really Want From Entrepreneurs.” “But, what happens is, when you look more closely, you can uncover a lot of opportunity for synergy. For instance, if you run a graphic arts business, you may find that other designers — your competitors — are very different. Some may serve manufacturers, while you focus on consumers.”
That, in turn, opens up the possibility of cooperation in any number of ways. On one level, cooperation may be very informal — for instance, referring customers to your “competitor” if, in fact, the client’s needs would be better served there. But make certain that any sort of referral or like cooperation is repaid in kind.
“The benefit from any sort of cooperation has to be mutual,” Gumpert says. “By partnering with someone, rather than trying to blow them away, you really create a form of synergy. You’re creating additional work at home opportunity for yourself by offering your customers additional benefits.”
Sharing Expertise As Well As Costs
But reciprocal cooperation doesn’t necessarily mean a strict quid pro quo that’s limited to the ring of the cash register. As Gumpert points out, cooperative businesses may share business expertise, technology, marketing insights and other vital elements. These are benefits that may not show up on your bottom line now, but may prove powerfully beneficial further down the line.
“What are the currencies that are being exchanged? There are really all sorts of payment, including information, expertise or exposure,” Gumpert says.
“When I work with people I consider my competitors, I know just the person to call all the time,” adds Lynn San Andres, a commercial real estate broker and president of the New York City chapter of The National Association of Women Business Owners. “In the long run, it gets the job done — and it can also lead to who knows what.”
Other forms of cooperation may be more formal and regimented, such as a partnership, perhaps, or subcontracting certain services. Unlike informal arrangements, it’s a good idea to spell out as many elements of the cooperative effort (if need be, in writing).
It’s particularly sensible to clearly delineate relationships involving customers. Don’t leave things murky when it comes to knowing whose customers ultimately belong to whom in the end.
“Who really has control of the customer? If you’re in a partnership, you naturally want to protect those people whom you consider to be your customers,” Gumpert says. “It’s often a good idea, then, to establish some non-compete rules so that no one takes control of someone else’s customers.”
Cooperating Can Lead to Opportunities
Not only can cooperation boost business and minimize needless competition, but partnering with others also can broaden financial and operational possibilities. Those can be particularly appealing in an economic climate that can strangle capital and make the most aggressive entrepreneur gun-shy about taking chances.
As San Andres notes, hooking up with a so-called competitor can implicitly strengthen your cash position and let you consider options that would otherwise seem far too risky.
“The concept of partnering allows you to think much bigger than you could on your own,” she says. “You have to be innovative, but why risk that on your nickel alone?”
If the notion of holstering your six-shooter in favor of greater cooperation appeals, here are a few final elements to bear in mind:
Take it slowly. No matter how appealing a level of cooperation may seem, dip a toe into the water before diving in headfirst. Try working on a couple of projects or referring a few clients to each other to get a sense of how viable a more concrete arrangement might be.
Let your clients know. If you’re cooperating with someone else in any fashion, talk to customers who may be impacted by the partnership. Let them know why you’re doing what you’re doing.
Look at it over the long term. Never approach cooperation or a partnership as a bailout, no matter how desperate your situation might be. Not only will you be more attractive to a prospective partner if you emphasize both your strengths and the resulting advantages of cooperation, but climbing out of a financial hole only to push someone down in your place can cost you dearly in terms of reputation. And, down the line, that may mean much more than just a soiled name.
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