Competitions: Should you drive them out of business or drive them crazy?

Imagine a world without competition. Your sales staffs need no making cold calls. You don’t need to pay for advertising. You need no direct marketing. Life is great and you are a billionaire. You don’t need to run after customers. Do not go to the office. Go to the beach instead, or go skiing. Keep your phone on for only an hour a day and customers keep calling you, begging you for your products and services.

Wake up now. That was just a dream! A sweet one? No, not really.

In reality no business lives in vacuum. There is no single business without a competition. Bedsides we want to have competition because :
. A good competitor forces you to improve your company
. Competing with a good competitor excites your employees
. Competing builds credibility for you in the marketplace.

Now hear this: Not only we want to have competition but also we don’t want a small one. We want a mighty competition, an industry leader. Why? Are we out of our minds?

Here are the reasons:

• Trying to defeat a small company is risky. If you are successful, the victory is insignificant and if you fail, the embarrassment is huge.

• Defeating a small company may be more difficult because it may be able to mobilize quickly, change directions on short notice, and fight a war as well as you can.

• You can define "victory" against a large enemy on your own terms. Victory can be as simple as a gain in market share. On the other hand, a true victory against a small company requires total annihilation.

A good enemy is usually an industry leader that is larger, older, and richer than your own company. A bad enemy is usually an upstart—aggressive and hungry and willing to fight viciously.

So now you have good reasons to have competition and (at least) a mighty one. Now what are you going to do with it? You don’t want to drive them out of business. If you drive them out of business you will a) never improve b) your employees will be demotivated and c) you’ll have no credibility in the market.
What you want to do is to drive them crazy. What do we mean by this?
Driving your competition crazy is disrupting your marketplace in order to create new advantages for yourself and to diminish the existing advantages of the competition.

We will talk about this subject more, in the future but here is the lesson we get from this article:
You don't have to destroy your competition or force it out of business—you just have to disrupt things.