Don’t Drive Down Your Bottom Line
$3 a kilo, $3 a kilo, $3 a kilo, $3 a kilo! Oi, they’re selling bananas over there for $3 a kilo. What are we going to do? Oh, we’ll do it for $2 a kilo. $2 a kilo, $2 a kilo, $2 a kilo. Oh no. Now they’ve mimicked us and they’re doing it for $2 a kilo. What are we going to do? The answer is not to drive your prices down. You need to embrace your competition. Make sure that you’re one with your competition.
Become One With Your Business Competition
When you finally embrace your competition and talk with them (go out with them for a beer, catch up with him for a coffee, whatever the thing is that you’d like to do, catch up with them and talk with them) you’ll find that they’re not bad people. They’re all in the same game, and the last thing you want to do is drive down your bottom line. It’s a terrible way to run your business and it’s cutthroat. If that’s the only difference that you have to your competitors, you should stop selling bananas because you’ll go bananas.
Make a Difference Between You and Your Competition
Credit different point of difference around what it is that you do, the voodoo that you do. If you’re able to change what it is that sets you apart, you’re going to be in a completely different level to them and then they’re no longer going to be your competition. If you’re the great company that sells vegan pies and they’re the great company that sells super duper meat pies, have that known. Even if you sell meat pies and even if they sell vegan pies, being able to separate yourself out gives you a different audience. And when you’ve got a different audience that you’re marketing to, you no longer have competition. You don’t have to be driving down your price.
Read: How to Decrease Your Operational Costs to Find More Profits Immediately
Catch Up With Them, You Know What Could Happen
I sincerely suggest going out and catching up for a beer, as I said with one of your competitors and just talk to them. I try it maybe once every two months. I’ll catch up with a competitor, sit down and talk with them, see how they’re going, the different tools they’re using, what things they’re doing in their business and we know it’s a friendly thing.
In fact, we’ve even set up joint ventures with them where we’ve been able to make sure there are noncompetes in place and if there are larger projects that we’re doing or they’re doing, we use each other to flow from one to another. That means that we both don’t need the overhead of an extra employee or extra group of employees for those times that you have bigger projects and we can use and utilise the workforce that we’ve got.
Being in business is all about being resourceful. There’s nearly never a lack of resources. It’s just about being resourceful and becoming resourceful and having resourcefulness in your business. If you’re able to do that and embrace the resourcefulness movement, you’ll be able to really go forward in leaps and bounds.
Watch: Key to Stay Ahead of Your Competitors
Look at the Positives
Don’t think about why it doesn’t work. Think about a way that you can make it work for you. Don’t go out of business driving your prices down, cutting out your profit and shooting yourself in the foot. You’d be crazier than a monkey’s uncle to do that. As I was saying earlier, you’ll go bananas. You’ll end up selling the bananas cheaper than you bought them. So don’t go down that path.
Make sure you look at your point of difference, talk with your competitors and see. Their audience might be completely different from yours. I know a lot of the time we’ll be doing IT support and business automation for a certain group of companies that are relying on certain verticals, and then there are other companies that are in IT that use the same tool sets, have a fantastic workforce and when we sit down and talk with them, maybe sometimes after a user group meeting or something like that, you find that they’re in a completely different industry and they’re reliant upon the gambling or medical industry more so than the manufacturing. You think, well, we’re never going to be in a position where we’re running into each other. Let’s use each other’s networks and collaborate together to grow each other’s business. Reach out to your competitor. I dare you.
Read: Are You Focusing on the Wrong Numbers in Your Business?
The Final Word
Make a relationship, make a difference, and turn them into a friend and someone who is no longer a competitor but instead compassionate completion of your business. I hope you’ve enjoyed this and if you have, made sure to jump over to iTunes, give us some love, leave us some feedback and stay good.
Contact a CHB Leader in Managed IT Support to learn more about IT outsourcing and other IT security solutions for your business.
Do you want to receive quality content about technology, business growth, life and mental health every week?
[module-377]
