How To Find Competitive Advantages For Your Business
A lot of business information is dedicated to fool-proof strategies and step-by-step turnkey business templates which have would-be entrepreneurs hopping to and fro without ever really moving forward.
Needless to say, you’re probably not going to start a successful business by following along in someone else’s steps. I’ll tell you why in this article. That said, I’ve written about this before.
Businesses are successful based on secrets and other competitive advantages. If you can build those (I’ll show you how) then you can build a successful business in most markets. Those competitive advantages are more important than any particular step-by-step method you could follow.
I’m not going to give you any actual competitive advantages of mine in this article… I’ll tell you why that is. I can tell you about them but no businessman can or would give their real competitive advantages away. In the next section, I’ll explain this.
Why Nobody Is Going To Give You The Actual Secret
I talk a lot about creating templates and techniques to improve your workflow and make your job as a businessman/writer/whatever easier.
On occasion, I even give a lot more away than I should. Take for instance, this easy 500 word article template.
Every time I write an article like that, I always finish the post by saying, “You’ve got to change it for yourself.” That’s not because I’m scared of anyone stealing my business or worried that anyone is going to usurp me; it’s because it’s not going to benefit you and it’s certainly not going to benefit me for you to take my writing and copy/paste it somewhere else.
My writing voice is completely different to yours. The subject knowledge we have – and the opinions we have on those subjects – are completely different.
On a couple of occasions, people have emailed me asking for links to my niche sites “for research.” It’s not going to happen for the above reason. Also… don’t steal my stuff.
Now, my niche sites and blogs and the like are insignificant on a scale of things. I’ll read forum threads with people asking things like;
- What’s a WordPress template that works like Facebook?
- I want to build a fashion label. How do I source t-shirts from China?
- I’ve decided to start a stock trading business. How do stocks work?
- I want to be an online marketing guru. How do I get customers?
These questions are pretty bad for obvious reasons. But the biggest reason is that nobody who actually knows what they’re talking about is going to reveal anything that would jeopardise their business.
The success of a business comes down not to any particular method or cute website design or something like that. It comes down to intellectual property; knowing what to do, which questions to ask and answer, and the accumulation of competitive advantages.
Nobody is going to give those away.
Competitive Advantages Make A Business
A distant acquaintance of mine recently started a new business. Unless something changes, it’s not going to be successful.
How can I tell this?
I’m not involved in this business’s industry. I don’t have any insider knowledge into the finances of the guy running it nor the quality of the work.
What I do know is that this guy has gone into a swamped industry with no competitive advantages whatsoever.
He’s an offline equivalent of the T-shirt dropshippers on entrepreneur forums. He has bought the same equipment that everyone uses. Also, he’s got the same website design, business cards (who even needs those?) and promotional material that every other company in the market has. More importantly, he offers exactly the same services that all the other companies offer.
… and this is in an industry where kids fresh out of secondary school are willing to do exactly the same thing he does for free.
How To Get Competitive Advantages For Your Business
This article is only mostly a Sunday afternoon “I can’t think of a topic” rant.
I try and make every article at least somewhat useful, so let’s get to the useful bit.
Why shouldn’t you want someone to give you the answers and handhold you through starting your business?
Ultimately, it comes down to the topic of the day: competitive advantages for your business.
If you go on a business forum and read, “How To Start A Business In Ten Simple Steps” then several things are happening:
- You’re following a method that everyone has access to.
- The market becomes more diluted the more people read the thread.
- Everyone else is doing the same thing as you to the letter.
- You’ll going to get the big picture, but the guy “selling” the method is going to keep the crucial bits to himself
- You’re not going to learn anything if you jump in too late and everyone else has already printed a million Pokémon Go T-shirts already.
More importantly, you’re probably trying to find a successful business idea so that you don’t have to go through the trial-and-error and probable-failure stage of your entrepreneurial journey.
Of course, that stage is where you’ll find the little nuggets of wisdom that’ll become competitive advantages. Take the guy from the previous section… if he’d just look at where the market isn’t as opposed to where it is, then he’d have a competitive advantage. There might be different services or different equipment or maybe just simply talking to different people outside the niche might make the business viable.
To build competitive advantages, you need to experiment and probably fail with your ideas. There’s no cookie-cutter template for success.
Competitive Advantages Are Unique To You
Earlier on in this article, I wrote that there was no point in me giving out templates to random people, because you can’t copy/paste a writing style/life experience.
The same is true of competitive advantages.
Let’s assume you follow the above advice and refrain from jumping into oversaturated niches and providing everyone the cookie-cutter service that they can already get from a hundred other suppliers.
You’ll find that you build little competitive advantages that only you could find. For instance, early on in my writing adventure, I found a little nugget of information that made me a more attractive choice than most other freelance writers.
(I won’t tell you what it is here, but I’ve mentioned it on the blog before as being something that most freelancers are incapable of doing. If you work out what it is, leave a comment and I’ll confirm/deny.)
Most writers would never find that little nugget because of their personality and temperament. Yet that one simple thing meant that I got an incredible amount of work on freelance websites.
That’s just one of many competitive advantages that have all come from little experiments based on emphasising what I can do and minimising what I can’t do.
Final Thoughts
Let’s summarise.
Most business people hop between great ideas that other people have already come up with. They find it impossible to succeed with these methods because the path has already been trodden. In addition, the methods are only ever incomplete – to protect the original business the case study is taken from.
A lot of people take those methods and use them to build businesses which don’t succeed. That’s because if you create a cookie-cutter business, you’ll provide exactly the same services in exactly the same way to exactly the same people that every other business in your niche does.
There’s no reason to pick your business over any other.
The way to get past this is to start at the bottom. Make a lot of mistakes and run a lot of experiments. You can do this for any industry by treading unknown paths.
In doing so, you’ll find and create competitive advantages for your business that the cookie-cutter guys simply won’t have.
Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as saying, “Here’s a list of competitive advantages.” Most competitive advantages are person-specific, timing-specific and come through a lot of trial and error. If I told you one of my competitive advantages, it wouldn’t necessarily make sense because nobody else provides exactly the same service as I do.
So, the point is that you need to develop competitive advantages based on your own trial and error. It’s hard work and elusive, but once you find and build those competitive advantages they will be the basis of a successful business and things that nobody can replicate.