Why Your Competitors Should Be Your Closest Allies

Hey, we all have competitors. And, at times, we don’t want to share any information with our competitors because we think they’re going to copy us because they’re going to compete with us because they’re going to really shrink our business. But I’ll have a different take of competitors. I believe competitors should be your number one ally.

A really close ally with you and the benefit of being close with your competitors far outweighs the fear of not wanting to share anything with a competitor. Cutting yourself off from them because together you can learn a lot of each other and you can both push each other forward.

In this video, I’m going to tell you and show you how I use my competitors as allies and friends to actually drive my business forward.

All right. So competitors, I know there is a real fear around competitors with most businesses and look to be frank, some businesses it’s awful, the competitors, are doing things that aren’t nice, not moral, maybe even not legal.

But I’m not talking about that instance. I’m talking about if you’re in an industry and you’ve competitors around you or competitors on the other side of the world. The competitors on the other side of the country or even local competitors. I really believe that becoming friends with them and sharing ideas and pushing each other forward and getting ideas of each other.

I think that is a better way to live your life as a business person for a couple of reasons. One is the biggest fear with dealing with your competitors is you think they’re going to copy you, but the reality is they don’t think you’re as smart as they are. They don’t think your ideas are as good as their ideas. And they also don’t have time to do every idea that you have.

They will look at some of the ideas you have. And they might take some parts of it. They may improve their offer. But they’re definitely not going to copy everything you do, but what is the upside of sharing with them? think about mental programs? If you have a mentorship, or a, what is it called?

When there’s a bunch of people together and they all talk. A mastermind, that’s it. A mastermind. So think about mastermind, right? A mastermind is so powerful because you’ve got people who are equals in across industries who are sharing ideas. And when you go to a mastermind, at the end of the day you have been up-leveled, you have learnt a couple of good ideas.

You’ve learnt a lot of ideas, maybe 30 ideas, but you may only take three of them and implement them and your business can grow and you can grow as a person, as part of a mastermind. Why not have a mastermind with your competitors? Here’s a great example. I have a coaching program and I have web designers who are in that program.

Now they’re all competitors and they all come on. They all show me what they’re doing and I coach them. We do it in a group fashion, and many of them check each other out. And they’d copy the best bits from each one of them. And I give my whole business away and I say, copy me, do what I do. All of them have been up-leveled because of that experience.

I haven’t found any of them blatantly just copying another web designer. They’ll take the best bits and they’ll throw away the bits that they don’t think are very good. I actually give my business to all of them and a lot of them just copy me and I, it hasn’t impacted my business at all. This is a big world we live in.

The value I’ve got from working with my competitors and teaching them and training them is I’ve actually got better. I was on a call this morning with some of the members of the program and I learned a few things in there that I’ll apply in my business and I was coaching them.

Being friends and talking and sharing ideas with competitors is so much more powerful than doing it with someone in another industry, at times. Now I know that someone from different industry looking in is very powerful. They can see the wood from the trees, they have a high level view, and you may be down in the thick of it and you can’t see anything.

I know all of that. But what about working with someone who knows your industry back to front? Who can say to you that problem, you’ve got I solved it last week. Oh, that problem there, this is what we’re doing to solve it. I’ll let you know how it goes. It’s very powerful. And that is the power of one of the programs that I run just with web designers.

I’ve seen an amazing transformation in my business and the other members of the program who have become involved. For example, there is one of the students who is really going deep down Google My Business, but the only reason he’s going down that path to the extent he’s going down is because of what of the feedback from other members of the group.

Some of those members he hasn’t even seen, but he’s seen the effects of the effect that they’ve had on other members. And he’s going down that path. Pivoted a bit. And he has been able to make a service and a product offering that’s, you know, Its world-class. But by himself, he may not have come up with that.

Now he was already going down a certain path, but that enhancements, those tweaks of other people in the industry, giving him advice has made a huge difference. So what could it mean for you? Are you scared by your competitors? Are you pulling back, holding back, making sure that you’re not sharing everything because you’re fearful of people taking your ideas?

What can I just say, the money in an idea is not in the idea of self. It’s in the execution of the idea. And unfortunately, most people don’t execute. They may take your idea and say, they’re going to do it even if they do that and most people wouldn’t verbalize that anyway. But even if they say they’re going to do it, it’s very unlikely they’re going to do it.

They’ve probably got a list of 10 other things that they think are much better than your ideas. But by sharing those ideas, you can really drive your business forward. I hope I’ve made the point and I just want to acknowledge Adam Cogan, who actually taught me this. Adam Cogan owns a software development company called SSW.

And I watched him for 12 years. I worked with him, befriend his competitors and invite them over for dinner and spend time with them and go to their businesses and sit in their businesses with them and spend time helping them and learning off them. And he grew an amazing business. And the defining thing that I saw in his business was that he just knew everyone.

When he went to a conference, everyone knew him, everyone was friends with him. But they were also competitors with him. I just saw how he was able to grow as a businessman and a human being and how his business was able to grow by being friends and allies with competitors. It is so powerful. Don’t have a small mindset, don’t have a mindset that says there’s not enough in this world.

There’s more than enough in this world for everybody. There are 7 billion people on the planet. How many clients do you need? twenty, thirty at any one time? 40? Like how many do you need? A hundred? Like there’s 7 billion people. A hundred is not even a drop in an ocean of how many businesses you can work with. And so don’t be scared off by the competitors.

Invite them in, learn from them, help them. Become better together. It’s the best mastermind you can ever put together. So, I hope that helps. I hope that really shifts your mindset. I really want to shift your mindset on that because it has just been invaluable to my growth. When I spend time with my competitors and they have driven me further forward than anyone else that I’ve come across. People who are in my industry, who helped me with problems I’m having right now.

So if you want to learn more like this and get more training like this. I have a Facebook group. Click around the video and you can join that group, and I do daily trainings like this. Otherwise, if you’re on YouTube, subscribe because I release a video almost every day and you’ll be notified of it.

Thanks for listening. I look forward to speaking to you soon. Bye.