Create Your Own Business Competition
The internet is adorned with slogans that sing, “The only competition is yourself” and other self-help platitudes. There may be some truth to some of those quotes-and-beaches captions though; you could create your own business competition by literally making yourself the competition.
That was a hell of a sentence, and not a particularly good one either.
Let me explain what I mean.
(Note: Happy Thanksgiving to everyone who celebrates it and reads my articles on the day they are written. Thanks for reading, guys.)
Why Business Competition Is Good
When things are going okay, it’s easy to stagnate.
You want to try new things, but there will be days where you’re not particularly curious. There’ll also be projects that you can’t simply start due to funding or time or whatever.
In those times, it’s easy to tick along.
Business competition keeps you on your toes. Whether it’s literal competition – a competitor that threatens to steal your customers – or other competing factors; the price of your supplies goes up, the economy shrinks or you’re starting your own business with less than $200… these things inspire you to try new things, push harder with what you do do and optimise heavily on every process.
If you want those things, then carry on reading.
How To Create Your Own Competition
Obviously, we want business competition for the above reasons.
But if you’re innovative or aiming for long-tail businesses (maybe services for local businesses) then competition can be hard to come by.
If you’re working in competitive fields, there can be too much competition, and we don’t want anyone else to steal our money.
The best way to create competition that’s win/win is to create your own competition. I mean this literally.
As an example, say you run a web design firm. You already know that split-testing is important, so why not create a split test against your web design business with another web design business that you own?
You could test these things:
- Do people respond better to a “one-man band” entrepreneur or a corporate-looking company?
- What happens if one service charges three figures and another charges five figures? Who gets more calls/business?
- How important is branding in your niche?
The results might surprise you.
Why Would You Do This?
There are a lot of reasons to do this. At first, it might seem like you’re spreading yourself too thin or wasting time on two businesses when you should be focusing on one.
If you look at big corporations, they constantly go through this process. One big conglomerate might own several businesses with several brands apiece. In doing so, they dominate whole industries.
For you, little internet businessmen, you’re probably not going to dominate a whole industry, and that’s probably not your goal. However, you get the same benefits.
You get to target different markets – the luxury and budget market, for instance.
You get to suffocate your real competition by giving people more choice; and the more choices you create, the more likely it is that the choice a customer makes will be one of yours.
Also, you get to try out new things that you wouldn’t want to risk your business on – like throwing up your prices by 500% or branding yourself to appeal to a whole new market.
Most importantly though, you’re going to create new ideas and use them in different ways. You will avoid stagnation by creating competition, and turn the whole business competition process into a game where you can’t lose.
You can then take the results you find and use them to:
- Continue running two businesses – create an arms race between your two ideas and leave them to compete with each other
- Synthesis everything you’ve learned and create or continue one business that’ll be better for it
- Scrap the idea if the second option plain doesn’t work
- Continue creating new business ideas and approaches and testing them against your established business
Those are just a few things you can try. This’ll work regardless of niche, market or industry. The principle stays the same; create competing businesses and work them against each other. See what works, and then adopt it. Rinse and repeat.
Final Thoughts
This is a quick article based on something I’m trying currently. I’ve written before that when you have an idea, it’s better to use that one idea multiple times than to come up with new ideas all of the time.
This is another way of doing that. If you run a business, you can throw up a new website under a DBA (Doing Business As) name and try a whole new range of strategies that won’t affect your original business.
From this, you’ll be able to move forward as well as avoid stagnation.
There are also a lot of other benefits, but you can find those out for yourselves. (Also, leave them in the comments section below!)