Lesson 3: Re-dimension your competitive advantage
Your business is not about you. Your business does not exist to perpetuate its own existence – it exists to improve the welfare of someone else. You are in business to serve. To care for your customers in the same way you would like to be cared for – to seek their wellbeing and welfare. Re-ordering your priorities in this light means that you have to move away from a profit-centered business model. The aim of your business is not profit – profit is ultimately a consequence of your business.
This then leads to a paradox – the way to make good and sustainable profit is NOT to have profit-making as your aim! We must be honest with ourselves here – retaining profit as a motivation but prioritizing customer service as the means to your profit is not the same thing as reorienting your mindset. Remember that our true motivations and reasoning will be tested and eventually leak out into everything we do. The better approach is this –genuinely seek to bring true delight to others and then watch the rewards come in.
This approach also leads to another unusual conclusion – the way we view competition. Step back and consider for a minute what competition in business means to you. For most businesses, they compete with other businesses for the resources of their customers.Competing with other businesses for the pool of profit held by a group of potential buyers whether that is called market share, share of wallet or even share of mind, it all boils down to the same thing. Our aim is to get something the customer has and we want to get it all for ourselves or at least get more of it than our neighbour. This concept of competition is self-centered and self-referential and is inevitable when you have a profit-centered business model.
In this view of competition, the customer is not truly the focus – their pockets are! This is a very important distinction, even though it is a subtle one. Traditional business thinking is that this kind of competition is good for the customer and indeed it can be. This is fundamentally because another business wooing your [potential] customergets you to behave in ways that may be beneficial to the customer, but this is not a guaranteed outcome.
If you are going to turbo-charge your business through any type of situation, you will need to ascend in your thinking. And that means approaching the idea of competitiondifferently. Remember you have now redefined your business and reordered your priorities (see previous parts of this series)– this is the basis for re-dimensioning your competitive advantage.
If you truly have the customer’s best interests at heart and there is another business that is providing greater benefit to the customer than you in an overlapping area, what should your reaction be? Any reaction other than joy would suggest that your customer’s best interest is not your core motivation. Yes, you might be disappointed that your business was not the one to provide the better product or service or even envious of the other company (if you are honest) but you should be happy for the customer. At this stage, the other business is not your competition. They are simply achieving your own objectives better than you. How you react depends on your underlying thinking.
Since you are in business to benefit and serve another person and they are doing this better than you, it would only be sensible to seek to learn from them – this should be the first impulse. Not learning how to beat them but understanding how the thinking and behaviour of that business led to such results. Whatever you do next, these lessons will pay off greatly. In learning from them, you will also learn about them and this will help decide what your next steps should be.
There is a wide range of things you can now do based on this unique approach and the lessons learned. You could decide to co-operate with them – for example, if they have a much better product than yours and the cost of re-engineering your processes is simply too high then you can decide to work with them in some way. Maybe insert yourself into their distribution process – this may require a deft touch and some diplomacy but has the potential to be very rewarding and to lead to the emergence of a collaborative ecosystem that provides much more value to the customer. Another option is to improve on what they are offeringbased on what you learned from them. In this case, this improvement is not out of spite but using the lessons to better serve the customer. You could copy them – this is one of many maneuvers you can make around them.Here, you could take the same principles and even the same product concept and apply it to another area or to another set of customers. The list of possibilities is endless. What you formerly saw as black and white competition has now become this multi-coloured set of interactions that advance your agenda of bringing true delight to the customer.
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Toluwanimi-Osinowo
Dr. Osinowo is a thinker and teacher: coaching high-potential leaders, advising organizations and originating breakthrough ideas. He is the founder of CANTAB Associates and the pioneer of SAPIENCE which is both a philosophy and methodology of thinking. He previously worked in the London office of the leading global strategy consulting firm Bain & Company. He studied Medicine at the University of Cambridge where he was a Cambridge Commonwealth Scholar. He can be reached for your questions and comments.
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