In my last post, I talked about how and why I like sharing business and knowledge with my competitors. Some people may think I’m crazy. But for other people, your competitors could be some of your biggest sources of business.
Let’s look at a few possible scenarios:
- David owns a small law firm that he runs with three other partners, and they specialize in intellectual property. The firm has a few associates, a couple paralegals. And let’s say one of their better clients asks them to handle a rather large issue dealing with tax law. The problem is none of them are specialists in tax law. They could try to read up on it and deal with it themselves, but if they blow it, at best, they’ll only lose the client.
Rather than trying to deal with the situation themselves, David instead refers it to a friend, Kristen, at another small firm that specializes only in financial and tax law. Since Kristen’s firm specializes in tax law and David’s firm only does IP, the odds of them poaching each other’s clients are nil. Four months later, Kristen refers a corporate client who has a new product they want to patent. The client ends up working with both firms, one for IP, and one for finance and taxes.
- Beth runs a small marketing agency specializing in video production and graphic design. A potential client asks her to design a marketing campaign for their new clothing line, which will include video production, but it will only be 10% of the entire project. She could hire a freelance contractor and make it look like she has the staff to handle it, but worries that a freelancer will have too many other projects when the client invariably asks for major changes three months later.
Beth instead passes the client off to Kyle’s agency, who specializes in B2C marketing, with the understanding that they re-hire Beth’s agency to handle the video. Because the client is happy with Kyle’s work, they continue to work with his agency, which means Kyle continues to hire Beth’s agency to produce not only this video work, but all future video work as well.
- This one is my favorite, because it’s true: Lorraine and Tony each run a small marketing agency. They’re friends, but they’re also competitors. On paper, they’re competitors. In real life, good friends. They rarely pursue the same clients, and tend to stay out of each other’s way. So one day, Tony suggests to Lorraine that they try a little experiment.
“I will go out and sell for you for a few weeks,” Tony says. “I will only tell clients about you, and not sell my services at all.”
“Sounds great,” says Lorraine. “What do I have to do for you?”
“Tell them about this networking organization I’m starting,” says Tony. The two agree and give this new arrangement a try.
The net result is that Lorraine grows her business significantly. And Tony’s organization, Rainmakers, grows to a respectable size, and Lorraine becomes one of the first members, and later, the president. With her guidance, Rainmakers becomes one of the largest networking organizations around, growing to 1,500 members and 41 hubs by 2009.
Now I’m sure that some lawyers and marketing agency principals are rolling their eyes. “That sort of thing would never happen,” they say. “We don’t help our competitors.”
Maybe so, but that’s an awfully short-sighted approach to take, because of the bigger opportunities you’re missing. There are plenty of examples here in Indiana of companies that do this kind of thing with great success.
Last month, I met two lawyers at a talk I gave down in Evansville. One was a trial lawyer, and the other was a corporate lawyer, and they shared business and referred clients all the time. They didn’t want to go into partnership together, but they recognized their relationship had resulted in hundreds of billable hours for each other.
Just today, I had lunch with several social media friends, and we discussed several different business deals we had shared with each other, or other friends. We realized we had created thousands of dollars of business for each other — money we would never have seen ourselves if we had been selfish.
“When I first started out,” said one person, “I tried to take on every project I could get my hands on. I was constantly fighting to meet deadlines, was working 16 hours a day, and was not happy.
“I started passing off the work I didn’t like doing, and only kept the projects I did. Now, I work less, get everything done on time, and I’m actually making more money than when I tried to do it all.”
The moral of the story? You can only achieve a certain level of success by yourself. With the help of your closest competitors, you can reach a whole new level of success, and so can they.
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