Fire and Motion

PREV 1 | 2

What do you do if you find yourself reacting to a rival's agenda instead of setting your own? The answer is to break the cycle as fast as you can. If you're a small company, you can't afford to respond to somebody else's fire. The big guys have 10 times the ammunition. So instead, you have to lure them into a Thermopylae of your own creation, where size doesn't matter.

The good news is that this isn't terribly difficult: Instead of paying attention to what your competitors are doing, start reading your customer feedback e-mail personally. Get online and listen to what people are saying about your products. Keep a running tally of what customers ask for through your company's website. If you actually do this, you'll probably stand apart from the crowd in your industry. The flat-earther corporations pat themselves on the back for having read Thomas Friedman's book and consequently dispatching their customer feedback e-mail to a team of dirt-cheap service reps 10 time zones away from their headquarters. They never have to be troubled again with what their customers need, want, say, or care about.

And what if your competitors are listening to customers? Don't waste a minute of your time trying to figure out if that is the case. If your competitors are really solving a problem in a unique way, you won't miss out by focusing on your own customers. Rest assured that your customers are already trying to tell you that this opportunity exists, if you'll only listen. A minute spent understanding the competition is a minute not spent listening to customers, potential customers, and near-miss customers, who would be happy to tell you directly what it would take to sell to them. You might even come up with a solution on your own that's better than the one your competitor came up with. That's when you start creating your own fire and motion -- when you innovate. Try something new that forces the competition to catch up with you. If you run an airline, and your customers demand that you install seatback TVs, what they are really saying is that long flights are boring. Maybe you can do something about the underlying problem. Have the flight attendants hold a singing contest, and the loser gets thrown from the plane with a parachute. And then sit back and rake in the bucks while your competitors scramble to get their own parachutes lined up.

Joel Spolsky is the co-founder of Fog Creek Software in New York City and the host of the popular blog Joel on Software.

For an archive of Joel Spolsky's columns, go to www.inc.com/keyword/spolsky

PREV 1 | 2

Try a RISK-FREE Issue of Inc. Today!

Renew | Contact Us | Current Issue

Select Services