What do you do when rivals emerge in your business? Avoid panic, FOCUS!
Whether you prefer it or not, the world of a company is a very highly competitive 1. Business is a game plus it takes a lot to sooner or later emerge as a winner. Earning however does require you to see a way to remain in business without regard for competition. Perhaps one of the most critical take-ups into account in determining who wins or maybe loses in the game of organization is knowing what to refrain from giving in the face of intense competition. Really costs me a year without regular pay from one of the businesses I’m involved with like a partner to learn this training. So, permit me to share the story.
On March 08 my friend and I took on the management of a defunct cybercafé. We had consulted for this cybercafé earlier in 2007, carrying out a total business process re-engineering including the hiring and coaching of new staff. That yr everything seemed to work good in the hands of the proprietor with us coming around every now and then to check up on things. Since it turned out after almost annually, things started going bitter because the owner wasn’t straight involved in the creation of the modification we had handed over to them in order to now manage. As a result, the organization towards the end of the season folded up, this time for the subsequent time since they began functioning.
This was when we got a free front-end offer from the owner to come throughout no longer as consultants but now while partners to resume finish management and turnaround on the business. How glad were we when this option came? It was an opportunity usually to experiment all each of our ideas on how to build an IMPORTANT business. And a significant organization we did build. No less than several pieces of evidence showed. For instance, in the first year of operations, the business recorded the very best sales so far since it had become, a whopping sum of 3. 9million naira! Also, we properly initiated a first-of-its-kind regular membership program for a cyber cafetín whereby browsers logged along with a personalized username and password of their choice. As a result, we have the greatest customer retention rate in all of the industry with close to 1700 registered customers since Mar 2008 when we took more than. We had the largest market share as much as the immediate community where all of us operate is concerned. Our own goal was very simple; restructure browsing from an activity (what people do) to an event/experience (what people enjoyed). All of us didn’t only succeed, all of us became an object to be jealous of, and just as is common with any kind of enviable performance, then arrived the wannabe -the self-proclaimed copycats (competitors. )
Such as a planned hostile takeover, throughout January 2010 a total involving 9 new cybercafés jumped into existence (compared to one at the time we took covering the business) with two living in the same business premises even as. We were about to be enjoyed up alive by the many new guys and so many of us panicked. Why? Because they don’t just stop at copying everything that we did, as is interchangeable with competitors, they had taken the game a step further. They will come with their flat display (LCD) monitors, a smaller quantity of systems in an air-trained environment: talk about a total put out of action! (TKO). There we were with these cathode ray tube (CRT) monitors, with more systems inside no air-conditioned surroundings. I mean they had copied many methods from our pricing model for the software we used as a timer. The only thing they didn’t want to copy was our account strategy. I guess it was more complex and will demand more work from their website. And that, my dear viewer, was and is still all of our saving grace. We never had any idea of this until after we had panicked and reacted out of paralyzing desperation in an attempt to remain competitive. The content our reaction?
We were head-on and bought our air conditioning. I mean most of us bought four air ailments all at once in the month connected with January alone. Paid PHCN (the electricity company) to run a new business line to be sure of a regular power supply since all of our big generators couldn’t electric power our four new weather conditions. Meanwhile, in all of our competitor’s cases, their modest generator could carry their own personal air conditioners because they didn’t include as many computers as we have and they had only one refresh.
We based the whole of your winning strategy on stable power accessories believing that we would fit with them on air ailments even though we didn’t find flat-screen monitors. In place of flat-screen monitors, most of us decided to expand by taking right up one more office suite along with the three we were previously living in to make room for the increasing demands from laptop masters.
In essence, we spent greater than they probably did but nonetheless lost a part of the total business. Why? Because we panicked and reacted out of desolation rather than being proactive. We all ended up spending more nevertheless for the wrong things. We failed to think through our decision to get those air conditions. The singular strategy of regular power supply went up in fumes exactly two weeks after setting up and the ACs we acquired were as good as useless given that we didn’t have the typical power supply to operate them. And we were back to square one particular, only this time with more arrears since we had to use some money from a bank to advance most of these reactive moves.
How will you remain in business despite the intensive competition?
How you respond to the particular competitions is the key determinant regardless of whether you’ll remain in business not really!
The entrance of new tournaments into an existing market can be quite a blessing or a curse according to how you respond to it. In the earlier post, I shared an account of how the entrance of the latest competitions nearly drove you out of business because we decided not to choose our response properly, we panicked and misplaced focus. This seemingly trivial mistake in tactical preparation is still costing us much headache in the business even though we are beginning to take corrective methods. Choosing your response properly after having strategically viewed every alternative is the concentration of this concluding part of the document.
Don’t Panic, Focus!
Challenges are very useful to businesses since they act as a source of opinions. Alone you might not be able to determine your strength or disadvantages objectively, but the emergence of competitions will help put your organization in a better perspective. Bring it or leave it, the access to new competitions will both make you or break an individual; these are the only two solutions for you. Panicking will split you as it almost performed to us but centering will make you as we afterward found out. Like I mentioned above, the entrance of recent competitions is like a headlong storm that sweeps anyone along its path off of their feet if they normally are not standing firm or keeping something strong and touchable.
As with every raging tornado, no matter how turbulent it seems to start with, there comes a period of best peace. This period can only always be enjoyed by those who were living to see it and that would be those that held on firmly as to what they believed in irrespective of exterior pressures. So don’t tension no matter how many your contests are; don’t do anything in haste out of fear. Instead, calm down to study the aspect of the new competition and allow your response to be born from understanding and not fear. Unless you understand their game plan, avoid responding yet; focus on your company by leveraging your regions of strength and seeking out much better alternatives to manage your weak points.
So what was fundamentally incorrect with our response to the contests?
In our own case, many of us responded wrongly because many of us reacted early. How you reply to competitions is what really things and not the entrance to the latest competitions. You see when competitive events show up in your line of business really more like a raging tornado that can sweep you out of your feet if you are not standing business. It is not the time for you to strain and start making frantic techniques born out of fear rather than strategic planning. We understood this mistake only following the power company we had backed upon for regular power supply in order to power our air circumstances messed up. It’s funny considering it now in retrospection; how could we have been so boring to have imagined a regular power in a country like my own (Nigeria) where irregular power was the norm? In my nation, the only way to ensure regular power is to own a generator -an expensive, high cost of maintenance as well as a fuel-consuming machine that generates power and pollutes the environment. In our first yr of business, we put in over 1 million nairas (almost $7000) on electrical generator expenses alone. Imagine in the event that such an amount of money had been plowed back into the business.
Please don’t misunderstand me here; I’m not at any time suggesting that the possibility of a power supply in Nigeria is usually unattainable. My point in fact is this; for now, such a likelihood is still far from reality. It does not take consciousness of this fact that built us to go as far as make payment on power company extra for a focused commercial line which they reported would be more regular compared to residential line. If we have been more patient and not in our panic mode, we more than likely have spent so much on the dedicated but irregular power nor would we have eliminated ahead to buy and set up four new air circumstances. All of this money would have already been diverted into some other proper areas in the business such as obtaining a bigger and better power generator that would have been able to energy the air conditions when we are ultimately ready to buy them. Read also: ‘We Regret To Inform You That We All Quit’: Two GameStop Stores Have Had Four Mass Resignations In…