Every Industry has Competition... What Are You Doing to be Better Than Yours?
Wed, Aug 14th, 2019
Lemonade World: Picture this, you’re 10 years old and you want to make some money. After bouncing around some entrepreneurial ideas, you decide to make a lemonade stand. A few weeks go by and business is booming. You have set up shop near a popular jogging path and your lemonade is selling like hotcakes. But there is a problem when this type of success comes too easily… it’s easy to duplicate.
After a month, dozens of lemonade stands start popping up near your chosen jogging path. This means that the jogger’s lemonade funds are now being divided up between too many lemonade stands… creating a stressful situation for you as your lemonade stand struggles to stay afloat.
So, you come up with a brilliant strategy! You decide to add sugar to your lemonade, then task your mom with going to the local grocery store, which keeps your sweet supply in stock. As the days go by, your sweet/delicious lemonade generates a lot of attention, leading to a larger piece of the pie ending up in your pocket.
But just as before, the good times don’t last forever. Pretty soon almost all the lemonade stands offer sweet lemonade. So, what happened? What happened was that sugar is cheap and easily available. Most of the other little lemonade entrepreneurs can get mom, dad or grandma to go to the store and buy a sack of the good stuff. Because your strategy is cheap and easily available, everyone can do it. So even if it has value, it won’t get you further than the competition.
Just as you created a business serving local joggers, a new venture has emerged. The task involves helping lemonade stands stand out from the competition. The problem is, just as sugar failed to defeat the competition, so will the marketing company failing to get business for you unless you allocate enough resources to standout. If a lemonade company is willing to invest enough to grow and stand out from the crowd, they stand a chance to have a successful operation even with competition.
The problem is that most lemonade stands don’t want to invest all the time and money needed to make them stand out from the crowd. Which creates yet another business opportunity... scammers! With a growing number of lemonade companies and few of them wanting to dedicate the resources needed to stand out, there is a huge demand for someone to come in and offer a cheap price followed closely by over the top promises they can’t realistically deliver for that cheap price. The key to any scammer’s success is to convince their potential “victims” that competition doesn’t exist or that it will not affect them gaining new customers.
Web World: Spending more money isn’t a magical solution to further your success, but if you set aside a decent marketing budget to have qualified professionals in your corner and give them enough time to find and execute the most efficient solution to help you compete you’re more likely to do better than your competition online.
Cheap companies use the term “qualified professionals” while using the cheapest entry-level staff they can gather, rushing them to do as many client tasks in the shortest amount of time possible. This leads to lots of mistakes and problems, which are rare with a true professional, but very common with unqualified individuals. Working with an unqualified web company leads to either (A) not getting good results to grow your business or (B) actually causing damage and undoing any previous success you had gained online.