How You Can Grow Your Business When You Have Many Competitors? – Part 2

Gary and Susan asked: What will you do when you have many competitors, in the same business as you are, serving the same market, and offering lower prices?

In the last post, we said that the first step is to stop being a commodity like the others.

The next step to address competition is: to start believing in abundance.

In the last post, you heard my story that when I got the franchise for STI computer school in Zamboanga City, there were many schools and local colleges who were offering short term computer courses. So, question, when STI opened, did their enrolment decrease?

Surprisingly no! On the contrary, all their enrolments increased! Why?

It is because when STI started to advertise, more people learned about computer programming and more people wanted to enrol. With STI coming into the picture, the market increased!

You see, there are two kinds of mentality: the scarcity mentality and the abundance mentality.

Scarcity says that the market is like a pie.  If it has 8 slices, and I get 1 then you will have 7. If I get 2 slices, then you will be left with only 6. That’s why in old marketing, biz go to price wars just to grab a share of the pie. At the end, all of them end up with smaller and smaller profit margins, until they die.

On the other hand, abundance says that there is enough for everybody. Let us give an example about the laptop market. The big players used to be DELL, HP, etc. To gain market share, they went to bloody price wars, at the same time, made their laptops faster and faster, added more and more memory.

Apple however, went for his own pie. They saw that there are more and more people out there who value time more than money.  So, they maintained the high price and quality,  and provided something which nobody did: Interconnectivity.

When I buy an Apple laptop, I don’t just buy the laptop, I buy time.  My calendars, my notes, my browsing history and my files syncs with my Macbook Air laptop over iCloud. I start doing something in my laptop and I can continue it on my iPhone or iPad.  No downtime.

Apple provides this specialized products and services for a different market which continues to grow worldwide without competing with others in price.

This is why in my book Grow Your Business, Pinoy! Roadmap page 107, the first thing that a business owner needs to do, even before deciding what to produce or sell,  is to “identify market needs and segments to serve, and to deliver exceptional value.”

So, my question to you is: what market can you deliver specialized value and not have to go into price wars with others? What market can you create where you are all alone there without any competitor?

So there you are committed business owners.  Two steps to grow your business when you have many competitors serving the same market as you do.

Step 1: Stop being a commodity like the others.
Step 2: Start believing in abundance.

On my next post, we will answer the question about how I trained my kids to love business.

Would you like to get feedback about your idea on how to shift to a specialty business? Send in your comments below.

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