I Have No Competition, Except Myself
“You have competition every day because you set such high standards for yourself that you have to go out every day and live up to that.” — Michael Jordan
Since my start in business, I have been convinced of one thing; I have no competition. I have always believed this was one of the keys to success. Curiously for me though, I come across other entrepreneurs and sometimes employees who stress and worry about what others are doing. They take it quite personal when someone else has a success. I had to ask myself, why do some look outwards at what others are doing while many look inwards for the source of motivation and drive?
Many authors and economists have wrote about competition being a good thing; forces us to do our best, monopolies create mediocrity etc. They obviously weren’t entrepreneurs with that type of thinking. Certainly over the years some monopolies such telecom companies or governments providing services lowered their standards so much that they became unbearable to deal with. But that’s not because they were monopolies. That is because they had no standards. Their standard was to offer the bare minimum, and that’s certainly not the standard of today’s great entrepreneurs.
If you are like me, and setting very high standards for yourself and your team, you are likely to be changing your industry. Below are a few things we probably have in common and if not some great questions to ask yourself about your business.
Your Company Is a Startup, Even If It’s Not
Startups hustle. Plain and simple to get something off the ground and into positive cash flow, especially if it’s a big idea takes an unbelievable amount of hustle. Does your company operate like a startup even if it’s not? is it lean and fast moving? does it focus on operating cash flow? does your team know the vision? do they check the metrics every day? do they even know what the metrics are? do they know their reward for sticking with it and grinding it out? I see many owners who use their companies like a bank account. Drawing off valuable cash flows for living the good life. That’s a very shortsighted approach and nobody will buy/invest your business when you want to sell it. Startups don't siphon off cash for traveling the world or luxury sports cars. Those are all nice things to have, but I’d rather earn it from salary, dividends and bonuses after dominating my industry and not by taking it from cash reserves that can be reinvested to grow.
What about your metrics? Any startup growing fast knows exactly what its Daily Active Users, its Runway or its Engagement Rates are. Why then do so many established companies lose sight of these or other critical metrics on their business? At LIMAH we currently track over 200 different metrics across 5 teams, and I have access to dashboards which are updated weekly. Having your whole team understand and know these metrics is a great foundation to a high performance culture. In early stages of a startup, often there is no competition; it’s not that there may be someone out there building the same service or product as you, rather it’s likely that you aren’t aware of them. Therefore your hustle and drive comes from within. The same can be said for the company that is 10, 20, and 30 years old. To what benefit is it to worry, research and try and gain access or knowledge from competitors? Startups are great at innovation because of the energy they bring. They are great at taking existing ideas and adding a 10X idea on top of it. This can be done by any company despite its years in the market.
Your Company Is a Tech Company, Even If It’s Not
One among many things that tech companies do well is to dream of the future. AI, Deep Learning, Big Data, Quantum Computing, Bio-hacking, Singularity, are all terms that every tech company that will still be here in 10 years ponders likely every day. So why then do so many non-tech companies never think of these of these futures? The future will be on us and disrupt nearly every industry in the next few years whether we like it or not. Most may not consider these futures due to not understanding what these terms and others like them actually mean. The average taxi driver didn’t understand how Uber would change their lives, but that didn't make it any less impactful. If you’re not thinking on the future and its coming tech and you are the leader or CEO in any type of business, you may not have a business in 10 years. That’s because you will be disrupted and displaced by someone who does. It’s actually not that difficult to learn about. You don’t need to be an expert in these fields. But you do need to be an expert and a visionary in how these will impact and change your business in the next few years. Even better, be the one that changes your industry through this tech. One great side of effect of thinking on and educating yourself on the future; ideas for new businesses and growth strategies!
You Insist on a High Performance Culture
Teams are a curious thing; they are easy when it’s just a few, because you can have personal relationships. As your team grows you’ll find nearly a daily challenge in how to manage them, as the personal distance starts to expand. That’s a signal that you need to grow to find new ways of managing larger teams.
Eventually though, teams will become their own personality as a collective and start making decisions that impact the culture. As a CEO there isn’t much you can do in the way of big speeches that will change a culture. However through consistent messaging and setting high standards, making everyone accountable, using metrics, regular coaching, a high performance culture will evolve. If you don’t have a high performance culture now, it is entirely your fault as the leader. Once you recognize as Tony Robbins says “you are the obstacle that’s holding back your business”, you can only then work to grow yourself and address all the issues you have caused for your team. Once you set those high standards for yourself, you can expect it from your team. If they are “A” players, they will rise to the challenge. If not, and you can honestly say you provided all means of helping them grow, then it’s time to remove that person.
A high performance culture is unbeatable in the market. It adds brain power to your product and service far beyond what you can do on your own. They become the ears, listing to the client’s needs and happily passing it on to others, as they want your products and services to be better. In my company LIMAH I made t-shirts and hoodies with our mantras, “Grind, work, hustle”, “Be phenomenal or be forgotten” and a few more. Seeing the team wear these around the studio is a reassurance to me; I have on my team people grinding it out just as much as me. That’s unstoppable.
They Copy You
If your products are imitated, if your services are copied, if the language you use is regurgitated all over the internet, if your company name (as is mine) is used in other people’s Google ad words, you my friend are the monopoly and have no competition. For me it’s a simple as it gets. If you can’t write your own marketing materials, pitch to clients and create social content from your own unique perspectives on your products/services than you are the imitator. For us this happens every day. Our text is copied verbatim on to numerous websites. Copying without understand though creates a lot of problems. Clients will have a high expectation based on the language used especially if it’s disruptive language. Likely these companies won’t live up to these expectations and lose clients. Knowing your niche is super important and marketing to that is all you should be doing.
If this is happening to you, the first reaction may be to be more cautious and pull back information from the public domain. This however I think would be a big mistake. Whatever it is that you do, you have to own and dominate that conversation. That’s why when my clients and potential clients speak to other companies imitating, they call them out on it. Done long enough and loud enough, your company can be the dominant brand in the space. Your name can be synonymous with the niche. Be loud about what you do, create the monopoly and own the space.
“Be loud about what you do, create the monopoly and own the space.”
They Desperately Headhunt
As a rule I almost never hire from within my industry or from firms who claim to do what we do. The reason is we have so drastically changed our industry that we don’t want to spend time reeducating people into our process and culture. For us we’d rather invest the time in younger talent that is open to learning a unique service such as ours and build upon their energy from there. This is often one of the best signals you are shaking things up; when they come after your team. They are hoping they can learn what they don’t know. Problem for them is, it’s hard if not impossible and very expensive to tear people away from high performance, raving fan cultures.
While we have lost a few people over the years, it’s been at the cost of 30–50% salary increases to these companies that hire them. That’s a huge price to pay, just because they can’t create their own cultures of innovation. For employees it almost never pays off, as these companies expect through one hire to raise their game and by copying hope to gain market share. Employees while valuable in their roles and on their own are an asset, however they can’t change an entire culture, and therefore that relationship with that a new employer dissolves quickly. Employers regret the high salary as it has no impact on the market share or keep hanging on to it with some hope it will change eventually. Meanwhile great companies are out hiring and training a new team member that can be brought into the culture with minimal overall disruption. Are you able to train up new talent to become thought leaders in your niche or do you need to recruit from outside to gain knowledge? If you are the latter, you have competition, and will find it difficult to gain market share over those thought leaders in your industry.
“…it’s hard if not impossible and very expensive to tear people away from high performance, raving fan cultures.”
You have Raving Fans
Word of mouth is the absolute biggest method of growing your business. Traditional advertising is of course dead, and other methods like social media, while very effective can be slow to grow. No matter the age of your business word of mouth comes from those people who love your product/service so much they want to tell others. While it is true most of that relies on your quality and service, the downside is that it can often be where all your focus goes. Often we miss the minor details of our customer experience. This means an inward look and serious self assessment of your customer journey is absolutely necessary.
To do this assemble your team members, some friends, even clients and customers and do an honest assessment of your complete journey. From the moment a person becomes aware of you, from contacting you, to your response, to your closing the deal, providing the service; what was the experience? Dig down into every possible detail; at my studio we even looked at how we serve water; cold with lemon/lime and mint! Look at how your team answers the phone, what does your office smell like? what coffee do you serve? how does your staff communicate? how do they upsell? what is your presence like in meetings? what is your office environment like? It can go on and on. This attention to detail is how many companies create raving fans. Been to an Apple store lately? Yes, someone designed every single interaction and experience you had there right down to the scent. Take the time to do this yourself on your business or collaborate with someone who can help. We have been able to help a number of companies and projects to create exceptional experiences and customer journeys through this exact approach.
The payoff for caring greatly about your service and the value you can bring to your clients is massive. Many of our clients refuse to work with anyone else because they know they won’t get the same quality results and service elsewhere.
“The payoff for caring greatly about your service and the value you can bring to your clients is massive.”
You are Hungry
The more research on highly successful people you do, whether entrepreneurs, athletes or leaders in their field, the more you will find they overcame great obstacles to get there. “Every single person who has ever done anything worthwhile or exceptional or difficult or extraordinary, anyone, whether it’s great artists or authors or mathematicians or whatever it is, everyone encounters difficulties, there is no easy road. It does not exist, it is impossible, everyone has issues. If you have time to pursue a hobby, if you have time to do anything in your life, you can better yourself.…Show me a great man who is the son of a great man.” — Joe Rogan
“Every single person who has ever done anything worthwhile or exceptional or difficult or extraordinary,…everyone encounters difficulties, there is no easy road.”
Everyone goes through difficulty or tragedy. Those difficult moments are what build your character and will define you. Some choose not to be reborn through these difficulties and rather choose for those moments to become their only story, the tragedy. Only five years ago I went from losing my family, to severe debt, to depression, I was homeless in a foreign country, lost my business, then wound up in jail. A near death experience while in jail provided me with an awakening and a rebirth. Since then I’ve been able to build from scratch with great business partner what is arguably the global leader in experience and wayfinding design. Not an easy journey; many nights were spent in physical hunger not being able to afford food. Sometimes we need to find ourselves at our lowest possible in order to find our unlimited potential and form unbelievable dreams. These are the moments outsiders find us most delusional. I am sure my cellmates found me delusional as I talked of the great companies I would build.
Delusion is a very common trait among high performing entrepreneurs. Not because they are ego-driven but rather they have a vision outsiders cannot understand. I still have the check I wrote for myself when I started my company; One Million Dollars. An ex-partner used to laugh at that. Since then, he’s not my partner, has no business and is jobless; sadly he lacked vision. I have created many multiples of that value in my company since then and I keep the check as a reminder of the importance on having vision. Was I delusional or was I willing to overcome any obstacle? We all will encounter such tragic moments, sometimes major life altering. But the question then becomes; what will you do? This thing that's trying to destroy you, will you let it? or will you use the energy and harness it to change your situation?
This becomes the “Hunger” if channeled correctly. It becomes an unstoppable force that allows you to dominate your industry because likely others have not experienced or are willing to channel tragedy. Important is to not forget these hardships and regularly gut check yourself, and ask if the guy who was stuck in jail, or whatever your hardship was, would be proud of you today and off how far you have come. If you don't think your future self will be amazed and proud, you probably aren't hungry enough.
“This becomes the ‘Hunger’…an unstoppable force that allows you to dominate your industry”
You are Unique
I left this one to the last as it’s the most obvious. If you don't actually have a unique product or service you probably have competition. That’s not to say it’s impossible to become a monopoly in that situation. Rather by playing with all of the above points you can massively improve your market position even if you are offering similar services to others. Create a startup energy with a big vision, study your metrics, innovate for the future, build a high performance culture, dominate the conversation and create an exceptional customer journey will help put you in top of market. Will there be times you lose to others? Probably, but through a serious assessment you’ll likely find the reason. We lose projects at times, and usually it’s over price and never because of another offering a superior service. Many companies offer low priced variations on our services. When I lose, I must then ask myself, did I lose to competition or did I lose because that was the wrong client for me? Was this perhaps not my ideal client and I should have not offered my services to begin with? Did I not do a proper job at assessing that clients needs and see how I can give them value? Almost always I find we errored in one of the above, which just means I need to seek out more ideal clients and communicate our value clearly. We rarely lose with ideal clients and by implementing all of the above that win rate keeps going up and up along with client repeat and client retention rates (more metrics I love).
I Am My Biggest Competition
I believe I have none, and therefore I need to carefully spend every marketing dollar, every salary dollar and every minute I can trying to innovate and add massive value to my clients and my teams lives. I then become accountable to myself and am fully responsible for the outcome of my business. This makes me a monopoly as Peter Thiel in his book Zero to One calls it, and makes other imitators. A “Monopoly of One” is about dominating the market of being yourself, not imitating and using your own inner drive and gut checks to push yourself forward. It’s about setting high standards and not letting yourself get away with underperformance.
“A ‘Monopoly of One’ is about dominating the market of being yourself, not imitating and using your own inner drive and gut checks to push you forward.”
There are some who say you need competition to drive you. However I believe if you need outside influence to drive you, you then have a bigger problem than competition. The competition must lie within yourself, to outdo last quarter’s numbers, to create more raving fans, to daily improve your game, to build a great culture and lead the future of your industry. Rather than looking for competition, assemble a group of high performers, entrepreneurs, athletes, whatever it is, people who you can regularly meet with to share ideas and inspire one another for greater performance. Hold each other accountable. This is competition but in the most positive constructive form. Negative competition is the destructive worry of what others are doing.
Ultimately it comes down to confidence that prevents you from worrying what others are doing. That however takes hard work and you must be the one who digs the deepest, is visionary and goes beyond superficial knowledge of your industry. You must have high standards and keep raising those standards. If you can’t do that without some outside company driving you to do it, then I suggest you close shop and go ask them for a job.
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I’d love to talk with you and know your thoughts on this article. Can I help you create an exceptional human experience for your customers? Get in touch.
Learn more about our work in experience design, wayfinding and public art at @ limahdesign.com
