You know who all your competitors are. You know their products. You know their prices. You know when they make a change to their website. It can take a lot of time but you know it has to be done. How could you run a successful business without paying close attention to your competition, right? Well, as a New Yorker might put it, fuhgeddaboudit.
It’s a distraction. One that is taking energy away from your business. Do you know your customers as well as your competition? Do you know what’s getting in the way of potential customers becoming customers? Of customers remaining customers? Of customers doing more business with you? These are questions that deserve more time and effort.
As Henry Ford wrote,
“The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all but goes on making his own business better all the time.”
Be this competitor.
And to do that you have to be focused on your business and a bit obsessed, and systematic, about improving. Pick any aspect of your business and find a way to measure how well you are doing (for example, how long does it take your team to respond to a customer?). Then, experiment with ways to make this better. Measure the result. Keep those things that improve the situation. Repeat.
Change one thing at a time. Small improvements on small improvements compound over time. The result will be that your competitors will then find your company is the one that is hard to forget about.
