I love my competitors. They’ve been really good to me.
No, seriously. I’ve been lucky enough to have some excellent relationships with my competitors. Over the past several years, I’ve gotten a lot of business, sales, and even personal and professional opportunities. I’m even friends with a couple of them.
Why? Because they’re not really my competitors.
For one thing, I don’t see business as a Zero Sum game, or that I need to clutch at every possible sale with bony claws. I choose a niche, make sure I’m an expert in it, and focus on getting the clients that fit that niche. And I work with companies that do what I do, but in a separate niche.
Then — and here’s why I love my competitors — we pass business back and forth to each other. Because who knows more about my business than my competition? They’re doing it too, so they know the issues, the benefits of our industry, and the pitfalls.
So if I do work in the agricultural industry, and my biggest competitor works in the healthcare industry, I really don’t want to do healthcare. I don’t know the players, I don’t know the issues, I don’t know the things to avoid or talk up. So if a healthcare company comes to me, I’ll gladly pass it off to my competition.
“Why?” you’re probably asking. “You’re passing up a big paycheck.”
Because I don’t want to do work that I would do poorly or wouldn’t enjoy. Why should I jeopardize my reputation and future projects just because I feel like I have to gobble up every job that comes my way. I will either get in over my head, and fail completely, or work myself too hard, and then do a shoddy job. Either way, I’m not going to get hired by that client again, and word of my failure will spread faster than any news of my success.
When it comes to most of my “competitors,” I don’t believe we’re competition at all… I have far different qualifications, strengths and weaknesses than the other social media folks in town. I’m a writer, he’s a designer, she’s a strategist, they do education, and this other one does programming. We might all be social media professionals, but we could go for years without bumping heads.
- Me, Doug Karr, Rodger Johnson, Jason Falls. We’re competitors, but we work together.
When I was writing this post, my good friend (and semi-competitor), Doug Karr, emailed me this quote:
For those of us with a proven track record, there’s more work than there are people. Of course, my target client isn’t actually an Indiana-based company, it’s national enterprises. Erik Deckers, Duncan Alney, Kyle Lacy are all colleagues I admire much and we’ve all worked together on at least one project or more together. That means we’ve all profited from working with one another – not against.
Unfortunately, I see this desperate, scrabble-for-everything in a lot of agencies and creative companies around town. Their niche is “everyone,” and their market is “everywhere.”
They forget that we have more than 55,000 companies in Indianapolis alone, and several million companies in the United States. This is not a zero sum game. There’s enough for everyone. And if you work together, there will be more than enough for you to handle.
But I also look to the future, because I never know who my competition may turn out to be in just a few short years. They may one day be my employer. That person I snubbed at a networking event may be the person I’m trying to get an interview with in five years. Do you think they’ll remember that?
So if you come to At The Top this month, make a point of talking to your competition. Find those niches that you both love to work in and see if you can help each other more than stabbing each other.
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