# 47: Got competition? How to make it work for you

With the London Olympics just around the corner, I’ve been soaking up all
sorts of Athletics statistics. One of my favourite discoveries is this:

In 1972, at Munich, Valery Borzov won the Mens 100m in a time of 10.14
seconds. That time is 0.02 slower than the Qualifying time for the
London Olympics (10.12 seconds). This means that every male 100m runner
at the London games will be faster than the gold medal winner 40 years
earlier.

How did this happen? How did we humans improve so much in the last 40
years? Well there’s a bit of sport science, probably a few drugs under
the carpet somewhere, but most of all it’s because there’s competition.

When we don’t have much competition we settle for being just a little bit
better than the rest. We do just enough to be ‘good’. We don’t reach our
full potential because no-one is pushing us.

When there’s lots of competition we have to try very hard to be better than
everyone else. And  it’s this very sense of competition that gives us
the energy to learn, practise, experiment and improve. In a nutshell,
the more competition we have, the better we get.  

Let’s be honest, in small business land we don’t exactly welcome competitors
with open arms. It’s irritating when someone else starts up on our patch doing what we do. And it’s insanely so when they have the audacity to do it a little better than us.

But what do we do then? Sulk, have a little whinge with some dear friends,
and then……we pull our socks up. We don’t want to be outdone, we know
we can do better and we get on with it.

Often the stuff we need to do to make a difference is quite small. It’s the
stuff we know we should do but, ugh, can’t quite be bothered. We’ve
slacked off returning calls quickly, getting deliveries out in a tight
turnaround, writing our blog…..we’re still doing a good job, But we
aren’t doing a great one.

You might not have had a new competitor step into the scene recently, in
which case you wouldn’t have had this wake up call. If this sounds like
you then today’s tip is to find two or three competitors and go and have
a snoop around at what they are doing.

Ask yourself:

– What are they doing better than me?
– Being achingly honest, are they doing an overall better job than me?
– What can I do differently to edge my business in front of them?

You may have heard people say “ignore your competition” . Certainly it
doesn’t pay to obsess about every move that your competitors make, but
do you really think we’d have a current 100m world record (Usain Bolt)
of 9.58 seconds if runners hadn’t been keeping an eye on each other over
the last 40 years?

Comments

comments