The Art of Beating the Competition in Business

Competition is what scares most people. But for winners, it is what gives them inspiration. For centuries, businesses have always wondered how to beat competition and become a market leader. While few businesses have mastered the art of outperforming every single time, other businesses just don’t know the formula.

Hence, we thought of sharing our insights on this important aspect of business with you, so that you can beat your competition and enjoy a comfortable market leadership.

Innovate

You have a whole lot of smart phones in the industry and then you have iPhone which has its own market. The reason? Steve Jobs, at Apple, ensured that they do not create a new product; they literally reinvent the phone. Before iPhone was launched, all smart phones looked ugly and non-“smart”.

But after the launch of the iPhone, every company started building such devices. Similar to that, there were no tablets until the iPad came into the market.

What I am trying to convey is – when you innovate rapidly and create something that is drastically different from what’s already present in the industry, then your competitors are bound to bite the dust.

Your competitors will have jitters down their spine and would not know how to react, at least at that point of time.
By the time they understand what’s happening; you would already be way ahead of them. That’s how badly you should focus on innovation and creating stuff that creates its own market.

Note, innovation involves a certain amount of risk; so the key is to do a lot of research and analysis before coming up with a solution.

Create a Strong Base

In order to thrive in business, it is extremely important to have a strong base. You see, any construction company while building a structure first lays a strong foundation. Why? Because it can contribute/help in construction of the huge structure faster and stronger.

When you’re ready with a really strong foundation for your business, you can grow leaps and bounds without worrying about the foundation. Whereas, no matter how big the opportunity appears, you cannot immediately grasp it when your foundation is weak.

It’s like, you might even go for the growth, but you’ll not have the basics in place. First understand what are the core aspects of your business that you will contribute to the growth. Also note, what pillars your entire growth would rely on; the more pillars you find, the stronger you create those pillars, the better it would be.

For example, Apple first spent millions and even billions of dollars in creating an outstanding supply chain. Today, they are selling millions and millions of devices every quarter with utmost efficiency.

This is what exactly what you also need to do and build a rock-solid foundation for your business. It will definitely pay off in the long-run.

Create an Amazing Work Culture

You know everything in business boils down to people. The smarter people you have on your team, the better it is for your business. Therefore, it is significant to create a culture that pertains to your business objectives.

If your goal is to create absolutely world-class products, then you should create a culture where people are encouraged to always think of ways to create great products. Involve them in discussions; take their suggestions on building great products. Everything in the product should revolve around products and nothing else.

Of course, there are plenty of things too that matter but since your main goal is products creation, that’s what your culture should also be about.

Some great ways to build a world-class work culture is to:

• Hire only like-minded people
• Micro-manage but allow employees to take their own decisions
• Discuss issues with them
• Be transparent
• Always, make them feel home

With a thriving work culture where every employees at home and have passion towards the company’s vision, you would be able to drive 10 times more results from them. This would ultimately result in outperforming your competition in the long run.

Customer is King

Have you ever heard the quote, customer is the king? Probably. And, it is absolutely true. For any business, customer is truly the king. Wal-Mart once wanted to increase their sales; they did not slash the price or bring-in more range of products.

What they did was – asked each and every employee to smile and greet every customer.

The result? Their sales improved drastically as it created a great customer experience for the users. Similarly, StarBucks launched a policy which is given utmost priority in their premises. Of course, they created great Coffees but the customer experience resulted in happy consumers drinking delicious coffee!

As a result, StarBucks have become one of the largest chains in the world.

While most businesses tend to understand this fact, a lot of them however, ignore it and consider money or sales as their first priority. That’s one reason why their businesses fail to grow even after good initial traction.

Luckily for you, a lot of businesses are yet to understand this so it gives you a great opportunity to tap into the deepest customer desires and their provide them with great solutions. The better your solutions and the greater your customer support, the easier it would be to outperform your competition.

Speed

Tsan Sui, the famous Chinese warrior, once said – “speed is the essence of war.” This is true in every aspect of life. Most of the time, just doing things with speed will keep you ahead of the competition.

Yes, that is right. The best thing about speed is – even if you fail, you will come to know about it sooner than others. That’s why I believe, every business should be focused to come up with problem-solving products, services really fast.

With speed, any business can do the following:

• Understand what works and what doesn’t faster
• Correct its mistakes
• Identify great opportunities
• Get market leadership quite effectively

And, when you execute the above, leading the entire industry would become a walk in the park for your business. In order to get maximum speed in your execution, work culture plays a significant role. Every individual in the team should be extremely at their productive best. That would allow the tasks to get completed sooner and faster resulting in speed in overall business.

Conclusion

To end with, beating competition is all about improving on different aspects of our business. It is nothing but doing better business than others. And, the above mentioned are the most important aspects that you must look for and improve upon.